My book "Birders of Africa: History of a Network" was published with Yale University Press in 2016. Drawing on Actor Network Theory and employing the approach of micro-history, I examine intersections between African and European birders. I explore how local African, scientific, and colonial forces structured these relationships. Through close examination of individual lives, I identify the aspirations and affective ties that drew birders to seek expertise and status through their collaborations.

My current research project is "The African Grey Parrot: A Global History."

I am currently researching the transnational interspecies history of the two species of African Grey Parrots (Psittacus erithacus and P. timneh). The work will feature these birds and their communication and relations with other animals, including humans, in six temporally specific habitats:

1. The species’ native forests in Africa, in evolutionary time;
2. Breeding aviaries in South Africa, in recent decades;
3. Urban households in Europe, America, South Africa over the past four centuries;
4. University laboratories, in the United States in recent decades;
5. The parrot sanctuary in Hope Valley, Rhode Island, in the past ten years;
6. Non-native areas in East Africa very recently colonized by individuals released from intercepted illegal shipments or escaped from household cages.

My 2016 book, "Birders of Africa: History of a Network," examines the interplay between local knowledge and science at the micro and macro levels. At the macro-level I consider the nature of agrarian bird knowledge and the history of ornithology in colonial Africa. I have found Actor Network Theory useful for reframing some debates about imperial science and its relation with local expertise. At the micro-level I work with the biographies of birders engaged in collaboration. These show that the structuring forces of race and empire left room for individual variation. Birders from all traditions sought status as experts, but the rewards of expertise differed greatly.

In addition to this monograph project, I have completed the first of two planned volumes of a sourcebook developed through my own teaching. African History through Sources: Colonial Contexts and Everyday Experiences appeared in 2014 with Cambridge University Press.  The second volume, on Africa from 1945 through 2015, is under contract. Jennifer Johnson of the Brown University History Department will serve as co-author. Entries in both volumes include government documents, memoirs by "ordinary" people and politicians, interviews with illiterate people whose perspectives might otherwise be forgotten, commentary by intellectuals, song lyrics, and photographs.

N/A

2023 Hutchins Family Fellow, Hutchins Center for African and African American Studies Research, Harvard University. (Spring Semester Residency)

2022 Affiliated Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Department III, Berlin. (September and October residency).

2022 Fellow, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina (declined).

2022-23 Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award, Brown University.

2020 Academic Writing Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (postponed due to COVID-19; declined in 2021).

2019 Engaged Course Development Grant, Swearer Center at Brown University.

2018 Carson Fellow, Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.

2016 Faculty Fellow, Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University

2016 Pembroke Center, Seed Grant for Animal Studies Working Group (Lead PI)

2015 Brown University, President’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Governance

2014 Benedict Visiting Distinguished Professor of History, Carleton College

2011 The Harriet W. Sheridan Award for Distinguished Contribution to Teaching and Learning at Brown University

2005 Best of WebCT for AF16 "Twentieth-Century Africa" course website

2004 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program at Brown University Outstanding Mentors Award

2003-04 Program in Agrarian Studies Fellowship, Yale University

2002 American Society for Environmental History Alice Hamilton Prize (Best article published outside the journal, Environmental History ) for "The Great Bophuthatswana Donkey Massacre: Discourse on the Ass and Politics of Class and Grass"

2001 Wriston Grant from Brown University for course preparation

2000 Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award from Brown University

1997-98 American Council for Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council, International Postdoctoral Fellowship

1997 American Historical Association Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant

1994 Indiana University College of Arts and Sciences Fellowship

1990-91 Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for dissertation research in Great Britain and South Africa

1990 Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, Title IV (FLAS), Yale University African Studies Center to study Zulu (summer)

1989-90 FLAS, Indiana University African Studies Center to study Tswana

1988-89 FLAS, Indiana University African Studies Center to study Tswana

1984-85 FLAS, University of California at Los Angeles African Studies Center to study Zulu

American Society for Environmental History

American Historical Association

Teaching is central to my intellectual growth and vitality. Brown students have prodded me into new directions and in nine years of teaching here I have become a different and more creative historian through their influences. At Brown, I have taught courses on Southern African History, West African History, Eastern African History, African Environmental History, African Women's History, South African Life Histories, Twentieth-Century Africa, and Africa Since 1950. My plans for future teaching and research are to continue to seek out intersections between environmental and social history in Africa and globally and to deepen considerations of the more recent past in sub-Saharan Africa.