About Me
I am a professor of history at the University of California, Davis who aims toward epistemic decolonization, community engagement, and public-facing scholarship. I specialize in the history of colonialism, development, gender, youth, and sexuality in Africa. My first book, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), is a history of Muslim women’s education and professionalization as an integral component of British colonial development initiatives. My second book, The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), co-authored with Elisabeth McMahon, illuminates the centrality of Africa and Africans to what we call the “development episteme,” the imperialist knowledge system at the root of international development policies and practices. I have also published in The American Historical Review, Africa Today, Past & Present, and other journals and edited volumes. My current book-in-progress, The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in East Africa (under contract with the University of Wisconsin Press), examines the impact of evolving cultural ideas about rites of passage and chronological age in East African customary and legal contexts.
I teach courses in African history, development, historical methodologies, and the global histories of sexuality and youth. I work with graduate students in all geographic fields of history, as well as geography, sociology, anthropology, development studies, and other disciplines. I am a faculty advisor for the Women’s and Gender History research cluster and interdisciplinary graduate certificate programs in Feminist Theory & Research, African Studies, and Human Rights.
In addition to regular professional service, I work to promote positive institutional change and greater recognition of diverse, innovative scholarship and teaching. With support from the UC Office of the President’s Advancing Faculty Diversity grant and the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, my colleague Lisa Materson and I launched the Workplace Climate Action Group at UC Davis in 2021. Our faculty team developed a procedure for conducting faculty-led departmental workplace climate reviews, and we created a website featuring a comprehensive list of assessment tools and resources for faculty which can be viewed here.
Education
Ph.D., African history, UC Berkeley, 2007
M.A., African history, UC Berkeley, 2002
B.A., History with minors in Africana Studies and Feminist and Gender Studies, Bryn Mawr College, 1998 (magna cum laude)