Education

My journey to becoming a historian of Africa and global intellectual, with interests in religion and politics began at Baylor University. After getting bogged down in psycho-analytic processes, I dropped my psychology major and serendipitously applied to become a Crane Scholar where I was paired with a mentor who was a historian. Thomas Kidd is an eminent historian of religion in America and author of over a dozen books including several religious biographies, and initially followed in his footsteps and wrote an undergraduate thesis on religious encounters between Native Americans and colonials during the 18th century. From there, I continued working on religion in America by going to work with another doyen of American religious history, Mark Noll, author or editor of thirty-three books, earning my first masters from Wheaton College. From these two scholars I learned the importance of understanding the religious beliefs of historical figures and how they shaped their life and work, and the need to take such ideas seriously even if other scholars have not been interested.

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But one of the reasons I chose Wheaton was to pursue my interest in Africa, which I felt was the largest blank spot on my mental map. Baylor did not have an African historian for me to study under and so I went to Wheaton to work with Charles Weber, scholar of missions in Cameroon, while simultaneously researching American colonial history.

I next switched gears and went to the University of Cambridge to earn a second master’s degree and a doctorate in modern African history. I worked initially with Brian Stanley on a project of Christian-Muslim relations in East Africa, and for the PhD I worked with Derek Peterson, a Herskovits winner and recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant.” Derek Peterson is the foremost scholar of African intellectual history and along with some of his grad students, including Emma Hunter, Jonathon Earle, Christopher Tounsel, and others, has helped to define the genre over the last twenty years. Collaborating with Derek and other figures at Cambridge working in the emerging sub-field of global intellectual history, such as Sir Christopher Bayly and Shruti Kapila, helped to deepen my understanding of the interconnectedness of ideas between the West and the non-western world during the twentieth century.

In my first book, published with Cambridge University Press, Building the African Nation: The African Association and Pan-Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa I sought to answer the question of how the people of East Africa came to see themselves as “Africans,” a concept that did not exist in the region before the twentieth century. I focused on two strands or expressions of pan-African thought: practical pan-Africanism and what I have termed redemptive pan-Africanism, to demonstrate how an African identity came to have personal or political purchase in the region. To do this I traced the movement of ideas all the way back to black trans-Atlantic thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as looked at contemporary influences of South Asian, West African, and African American figures. Three of the seven chapters are intellectual mini-biographies of pan-African thinkers including James Aggrey, Paul Sindi Seme and Julius Nyerere. One of the main contributions of the book is to provide a more inclusive definition of pan-Africanism that included many expressions—a conceptualization which I hope will be of value to future scholars.