Research

As a scholar of global intellectual history I am interested in how ideas moved across boundaries of both time and space over the last two or three centuries. My main area of expertise is East Africa, but I examine how East Africans engaged with the ideas of others. My first book, for instance, traced the growth of the "African" identity in the region by linking a group of African political activists in early twentieth-century Tanganyika and Zanzibar to other contemporaries from India, West Africa, the United States and other East African countries, and connecting them to currents of global black thought, such as Ethiopianism, which was first expounded by trans-Atlantic Africans in the 1700s.

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In general, I study African political thinkers and their ideas, especially when they intersect with religious or global phenomena such as inter-religious relations, pan-Africanism, imperialism, the Cold War, the Zanzibar Revolution, or religious thought.

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My current project is an intellectual and religious biography of Julius Nyerere, arguably the most important African of the twentieth century. This work not only looks at him through a global lens, but seeks to illuminate African responses to some of the most important phenomena of the twentieth century including imperialism in Africa; the role of society and humanity in the post-War world; anticolonialism and liberation; nation building; the Global Cold War; Apartheid and global racism; third world theologies; the international financial crisis of the 1980s and 90s and the changing shape of Christianity. 

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If any of these topics intrigue you too, and you are interested in collaborating, please reach out!