This fall, the Department welcomed its first graduate students who specialize in African history. They will participate in the newest Ph.D. program concentration, which trains historians to undertake cutting-edge research and teaching in that field.
The three Africanist faculty members––Lisa Lindsay, Lauren Jarvis, and Emily Burrill––have wanted to establish a Ph.D. program concentration in African history for a number of years. “It was nice to find ourselves in a situation where the program was a long time coming in some ways, but we couldn’t really get it off the ground until we knew that we had enough faculty to offer the courses we needed. It was wonderful to see how supportive the department was in creating it,” Burrill said.
Each of the three Africanist faculty members works with one of the new graduate students. Emily Burrill advises Abbey Warchol. Both study twentieth-century Senegal and francophone West Africa. Lisa Lindsay and her advisee Emmanuel Osayande specialize in Nigerian history. Lauren Jarvis advises Laura Cox, who, like her adviser, focuses on twentieth-century South African history.
Abbey Warchol | Emmanuel Osayande | Laura Cox |
Because they approach African history from a global perspective, Osayande and Cox are co-advised by faculty specializing in other world regions. Osayande works with Michael Morgan, a specialist in global human rights who can help Osayande expand the focus of his project beyond the borders of Nigeria. “I’m trying to look at the roles of NGOs in sociopolitical developments in post-1945 Nigeria,” Osayande said. “Moving onto the dissertation, I’m hoping to be able to explore more international NGOs. Currently my focus has been on local NGOs in Nigeria, and that has been because of constraints in doing the research. If you’re working with international NGOs like Oxfam or Amnesty International, it would require you doing research abroad, in several other countries.”
Laura Cox is co-advised by Claude Clegg, who studies the African diaspora, particularly in the United States. For Cox, the opportunity to work with co-advisors drew her to UNC’s program, as she believes it will help her develop the tools to undertake a transnational dissertation project. “I’m looking at relationships formed between African American and South African women,” Cox said. “I’ll be looking at how ideas circulated–on gender, on femininity, on ideologies of race–and how that changed because this was a transnational movement.”
All of the new graduate students have prior experience researching African histories, and two lived or worked in African nations before coming to graduate school at UNC. Abbey Warchol frequently traveled to Senegal for her job as a project manager at a child sponsorship NGO, which inspired her to pursue research on the history of sponsorship and symbolic adoption programs.
Emmanuel Osayande is a co-founder of Erudite Drive, an educational development and advocacy NGO in Nigeria. One of its projects is History Club, which promotes history education in Nigeria’s secondary schools. “History became an endangered discipline in Nigeria,” Osayande explained. “It was scrapped from the high school curriculum for several years, and it was just reinstated last year, after much pressure. What we’ve been doing is to get volunteers to go teach the students in secondary school history, and we’ve been making meaningful progress. For instance, the last school where we carried out our volunteer work, they ended up hiring a history teacher after because of the interest from the students.”
Although there are only three Africanist graduate students in the department, 10 students are enrolled in the inaugural African history seminar this fall. They include historians studying French and Middle Eastern history, as well as graduate students in anthropology, religious studies, and art history. Burrill was pleased to see the popularity of the seminar, as she thinks historians in many fields can benefit from studying Africa. “I think that taking an African history seminar, for someone who does not define themselves as an Africanist, is useful for thinking about broader themes of colonial, postcolonial, and settler history,” she said.
Abbey Warchol chose UNC’s graduate program in part because of this interdisciplinary community of Africanists. “From the time I got my offer, I was contacted by folks in the Anthropology and Art History Departments who study Africa. Right from the beginning, I was welcomed into this community that they told me was small but was close-knit,” she said. Warchol and the other new graduate students also work closely with the African Studies Center, which provides funding, support, and training to Africanists across many disciplines. For example, Warchol secured a FLAS grant to take coursework in Wolof, one of the languages native to Senegal. The Center, which Emily Burrill directs, also offers professional development seminars specifically for Africanists.
Although few of the students in their other classes specialize in African history, the new Africanist graduate students are able to have thought-provoking conversations with their peers in other fields. “People have experience with subaltern studies, so we’re all grappling with these same questions,” Laura Cox said. “I think the community here is very well-equipped to understand some of the broad themes and challenges of doing African history.”