I am an intellectual historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century Africa. I am a former legal resident of Uganda, where I studied local languages and cultivated many of the networks that continue to shape my work today.
I earned my PhD in African history from Cambridge University in 2012, where I studied under Professors Derek Peterson and John Lonsdale. I currently serve as the Co-Chair of the Uganda Studies Group of the African Studies Association, the largest international body devoted to studying Uganda. I am an associate professor of African history at Centre College and an International Research Fellow for the Kingdom of Buganda. I was elected a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2021, and re-elected in 2024–2025.
My work broadly explores how historical imagination animates political and religious practices. My research and teaching are increasingly interested in how ideas about beauty, wilderness, and the natural world inform historical interpretation, political violence, and resistance. In History in Africa, I offered a multispecies history of colonial Buganda. In the early to mid-1900s, colonial administrators sought to draw Baganda interlocutors into abstract conversations about a natural world devoid of political power. Through Witchcraft Ordinances, imperial administrators sought to distance spirits, rocks, trees, snakes, and other life forms from the concrete world of social movement and dissent. But in late colonial Uganda, the trade unionist Erieza Bwete and the influential spirit prophet Kibuuka Kigaanira navigated environmental spaces imbued with political significance. My forthcoming article in The Historical Journal (Spring 2025) explores how late colonial nationalists struggled to control the creation of national material culture, which entailed far-reaching debates about beauty and color.
To develop my understanding of natural history humanities, I have created two field courses: Ideas of Wilderness, taught in the Red River Gorge of Kentucky (January 2024); and Winter in Yellowstone, which I will lead in January 2026 with Centre College and Yellowstone Forever.
I am writing two trade press books, one on the 800-year history of the eastern African kingdom of Buganda and another on Theodore Roosevelt’s expedition in Africa between 1909 and 1910. Brent Howard represents these books.
I am also editing two pioneering projects. First, I am the founding editor of the Cambridge History of African Political Thought (with Emma Hunter, Harry Odamtten, Ayesha Omar, & Nana Osei-Opare), which brings together senior and emerging scholars in African intellectual history to assess earlier approaches in the study of African political thought, while simultaneously identifying emerging trends. This collection of chapters is not merely a summation of existing scholarship; it suggests an innovative, comprehensive vision for recasting the history of political thought and global intellectual history writing.
Second, I am the co-editor of African Histories of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press) with Shirli Gilbert. Few topics have been studied more than the Holocaust (Shoah). The rise, fall, and legacies of the Nazi extermination of six million Jews remain one of the most consequential events of our time. Despite thousands of books, films, songs, and podcasts, we know surprisingly little about how African historians, communities, and intellectuals have deployed and reimagined histories of the Holocaust and its afterlives. This book is the first to bring together leading and emerging scholars to explore the varied ways in which African and Jewish experiences intersected and collided during the Holocaust and throughout the postcolonial world. In doing so, it creates new ways of thinking about how Africans reworked the legacies and histories of the Holocaust into the continent’s most critical moments throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
My first book on the Kingdom of Buganda’s colonial history (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize of the African Studies Association. The prize is awarded to the best book written on Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Somaliland, Tanzania, or Uganda. Colonial Buganda was one of the most important and richly documented kingdoms in East Africa. My book offers the first global intellectual history of the Kingdom, using a series of case studies, interviews, and previously inaccessible private archives to provide new insights concerning the multiple narratives used by intellectuals. Where previous studies on literacy in Africa have presupposed 'sacred' or 'secular' categories, I argue that activists blurred European and Ugandan epistemologies as they reworked colonial knowledge into vernacular debates about kingship and empire. By presenting Catholic, Muslim, and Protestant histories and political perspectives in conversation with one another, I offer a nuanced picture of the religious and social environment, rethinking the dynamics of political imagination and historical pluralism in the colonial and postcolonial state. Click here for reviews.
My second book, Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda (James Currey 2021), co-authored with James Jay Carney (Creighton), examines the career of Uganda’s first elected prime minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka. Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda's first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. We show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extrajudicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects circulating throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Drawing on never-before-seen sources from Kiwanuka's papers, we upend many assumptions that have framed Uganda's political and religious history for over sixty years and reposition Uganda's politics within the global arena. Click here for reviews.
For my work on Kiwanuka and the DP, I was invited to curate Uganda’s national exhibition on the Democratic Party during the country’s 60th Anniversary.
My third book is Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge & Public Life (James Currey, 2021). Co-edited with Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Nakanyike Musisi, and Edgar Taylor, the book rethinks ongoing debates about the decolonization of African studies. Decolonization of knowledge has become a significant issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe, and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.
My work on Uganda’s intellectual history has also appeared in the Journal of Eastern African History, History in Africa, and the Journal of African History. My chapter on ‘African Intellectual History’ contributed to the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources, which the American Historical Association awarded the Waldo G. Leland prize for the best reference work published over the past five years.
I have actively participated in Uganda’s public history and heritage management. I helped catalogue the Uganda National Archives, resulting in a multi-million-dollar grant from UNESCO to relocate the state archives from Entebbe to Kampala. I worked with Ugandan archivists to preserve and develop the Soroti District Archives (in eastern Uganda). I have also digitized numerous private holdings, including the papers of the co-author of Uganda’s postcolonial constitution, Eridadi Mulira, whose material is now available online through Cambridge University Library.
My research animates my passion for teaching. At Cambridge, I facilitated tutorials, lectures, and seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels, teaching the history of modern Africa and historical methodology. At Centre, I have developed a creative pedagogy, often leading me to structure courses around community-based learning. I offer regular studies abroad in eastern Africa (2014, 2015, 2019) and co-directed the Centre-in-London program in 2017. With Dr. Katrin Bahr, I co-directed a study abroad in Germany and Poland (January 2022) on the colonial genealogies of the Holocaust. I have also worked with student researchers in Rwanda, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. I was awarded the Education Award of the Kentucky Historical Society in 2020. For outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service, I was appointed a Centre Scholar in 2016, 2019, and 2023, and awarded a Stodghill Research Professorship in 2017. Please see my CV for a complete list of courses I have taught.
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