University of Minnesota
Department of History
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Home > Graduate Studies > Areas of Graduate Study : African History

African History

Joyce Chadya: The University of Minnesota offers one of the best African history programs in the country. It is such an honor to work with such distinguished and experienced faculty, including those outside African history. Not only are the faculty passionate about their work but they also motivate us and they care. They make us feel at home far away from home.

African history is a new and dynamic field dating back to the 1960s. It was linked to the decolonization of Africa and the need for new national states to have a usable past. During the next four decades the field of African history has moved away from colonial and Eurocentric formulations to stressing African agency and creative adaptations and representations. It relies on innovative fieldwork as well as more traditional archival research.

Minnesota has one of the leading programs in African social history in the country. Our overarching concern is to put African women and men—in their classes, families, communities, and workplaces—firmly into our scholarship. In our courses we challenge old analytical categories and artificial temporal or spatial divides to examine dynamic relations of power, and conflict and negotiations at the local, national, and transnational levels.

Participating Faculty

  • Allen Isaacman Allen Isaacman's research has focused on the social history of peasants and slaves in Mozambique as well as anti-colonial struggles in that country. He offers courses in historical methodology and historiography, Southern African history, and agrarian history.

  • Helena Pohlandt-McCormick Helena Pohlandt-McCormick's research focuses on social conflict and racial oppression in South Africa, historical memory and violence, the multiple contested discourses of the apartheid regime and the African National Congress, and the experience and meaning of exile for the thousands of people who fled apartheid. She teaches South African cultural and social history; African women’s history and comparative women’s history; methodology: oral history, life histories and autobiography; memory and history; precolonial Africa; history of exile; as well as general African history and post-colonial and
    post-apartheid historiography and theory.

Affiliated Faculty

  • Keletso Atkins (Department of African American and African Studies) specializes in the history of South Africa and issues of the African diaspora and offers graduate courses in both areas.
  • Victoria Coifman’s (Department of African American and African Studies) research has been primarily in Senegal. She teaches courses in West African history and oral methodology.

Additionally, students are also encouraged to take courses from Africanists in other departments including:

Graduate Features

Graduate Studies
Rachel Ayers
1130 Heller Hall
271 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Phone: 612-624-5840
Email: histdgs@umn.edu

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