About our staff

Twitter: @emma_edin

Head of School

I am a historian of Africa in a global context with particular interests in intellectual history and the global history of political thought, print culture and the history of nationalism and decolonization. I grew up in Edinburgh then studied and taught in Cambridge before returning to Edinburgh and joining the School of History, Classics and Archaeology in January 2015.

From 2016-2018 I was Postgraduate Director for the School of History, Classics and Archaeology and from April to December 2019 I was Academic Lead (CAHSS) for a university-wide review of personal tutoring and student support. I co-founded the Global and Transnational History  Research Group in 2015 and was founding co-director of the new Edinburgh Centre for Global History from January to July 2019.

I am principal investigator for a Leverhulme-funded project ‘Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s’ with Daniel Branch and Gerard McCann which began in January 2019 and will run until December 2022. In 2018-19 I was the Quentin Skinner Fellow in Intellectual History at CRASSH at the University of Cambridge. 

View of Lake Victoria, Tanzania

I am a co-editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies. I also serve on the editorial boards of Africa and Social History. Together with Dr Devon Curtis and Dr Bronwen Everill, I am a co-editor of the Cambridge Centre of African Studies book series with Ohio University Press. I am a member of the governing council of the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and hold the role of Honorary Secretary.

Edinburgh Centre for Global History  

Summary of research interests

• Africa

• Comparative & Global History
• Ideas
• Imperialism
• Politics

• Twentieth Century & After

My research explores intellectual histories and the history of political ideas in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on Eastern Africa. I am interested in the potential which print cultures offer to explore global histories of political thought.

I am interested in the ways in which political ideas were forged in particular regional contexts in dialogue with transnational intellectual currents. My first book, Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania: freedom, democracy and citizenship in the era of decolonization, combined methodologies drawn from the history of political thought with a deep understanding of the social and political history of a locality to explore how universal questions of political theory were argued over in a specific context in a time of dramatic political change, using primarily Swahili-language sources. The arguments made in the book have enabled me to contribute to wider debates in the history of nationalism, decolonization and state-making in twentieth-century East Africa.

The second dimension of my research is the rethinking of global history from East Africa and histories of East African regionalism. I am currently leading a four-year research project entitled ‘Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s’ which began in January 2019 and will run until December 2022, together with Dr Ismay Milford (Edinburgh), Dr Gerard McCann (York) and Professsor Daniel Branch (Warwick). I am also writing a new history of Tanzania in a global context for Cambridge University Press. From 2016-18 I was co-investigator of a British Academy project led by Chris Vaughan Negotiating region and state after independence: imagining and (de)constructing integration in East Africa, 1960s-70s. 

Underpinning both dimensions of my research is an interest in newspapers and periodicals which I have written about both as sources and as objects of study in their own right. From 2015-2020 I worked with Leslie James and a wider group of scholars working in different disciplines on the colonial societies of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, East and South East Asia to explore the relationship between print media and colonial society  in a comparative perspective, and this led to a special issue of Itinerario published in 2020.

Dodoma, Tanzania

Another World: East Africa and the Global 1960s

Global connections are brittle. The global turn in History and Politics has privileged long-term flows of people, capital and ideas, assuming the ubiquity and ever-increasing power of these connections. But the view from early postcolonial East Africa challenges this narrative. By studying East Africa’s textual cultures we will demonstrate that global connections were powerful and real at independence. But by the early 1970s, utopian ideas of a globally connected African future had been destroyed by introverted nationalism. This project, for which I am the principal investigator, interrogates key assumptions of the linearity of globalisation by exploring how a vision of a connected postcolonial world shattered. 

• Politics and Power in Post-Colonial East Africa 

• The Bandung Moment: Revolution, Anti-Imperialism and Afro-Asian Connections in the Global Twentieth Century 

• Global Connections since 1450

• African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in Modern African History, c. 1880-1975

Louisa Cantwell, 'Chiefship, power and state in the Bakgatla community in Botswana, 1870–2014', University of Cambridge (Primary supervisor)

Henry Dee, 'Clements Kadalie, Trade Unionism, Migration and Race in Southern Africa, 1918-30', University of Edinburgh (Co-Supervisor)

Donald Fraser, 'The rise and fall of the British veterinary profession in the agrarian development of Kenya, 1937-1967', University of Cambridge (Primary supervisor)

Maurice Hutton, 'Modernisers at work: the development plans and practices of the African Administration Department of late colonial Bulawayo, 1949-76', University of Edinburgh (Secondary supervisor)

Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, ‘Imagining Modernity in the Uganda Prisons Service, 1945-1979', University of Cambridge (Primary supervisor)

Brooks Marmon, 'Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonisation in Southern Rhodesian Politics, ca. 1950-1963' (Secondary supervisor)

Eva Namusoke, 'Church and State in Post-Colonial Uganda, 1962-1981’, University of Cambridge (Primary supervisor)

Catherine Porter, ‘Nationalism, Authority and Political Identity in the Secession of Katanga, 1908-1963’, University of Cambridge (Primary supervisor)

I have supervised a range of PhD topics in the field of African history. I welcome proposals for research projects in the field of African political, intellectual, cultural and social history.