About Me
I am a Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. My research focuses on gender, sexuality, childhood and youth, colonialism, and international development in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Africa.. My first book, Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), investigates the history of Muslim girls’ education and women’s professionalization in the Zanzibar Islands. I co-authored, with Elisabeth McMahon, The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020). My most recent book The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025) confronts the cultural and legal ramifications of gender and sexual stereotypes about rites of passage marking the transition from childhood to adulthood in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. My work also appears in the American Historical Review, Past & Present , the Journal of Women’s History, Africa Today, and other journals and edited volumes.
I teach courses in the feminist theory; history and theory of sexuality; gender, culture, and globalization; modern youth cultures; sexuality and imperialism; African history; and historical methodologies. I work with graduate students in History, Cultural Studies, Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, International Development studies, and other disciplines. I am affiliated with the Department of History, the Cultural Studies Graduate Group, the International Agricultural Development Masters Program; the Designated Emphasis in Feminist Theory & Research, and the Designated Emphasis in African American and African Studies at UCD.
In addition to regular professional service, I work to promote positive institutional change and greater recognition of diverse, innovative scholarship and teaching. I have served in department leadership positions and various executive and advisory committees for departments and programs. 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)