Colloquium in Modern African History
Spring 2013
HIAF 7002 is a colloquium for graduate students reading the history of modern Africa, roughly since the early nineteenth century, mostly south of the Sahara Desert. It is intended to facilitate preparation of major and minor fields in African history and to acquaint students in other departments and schools of the University with historical approaches to Africa. The colloquium first introduces the scholarly resources in the field (texts, journals, bibliographies, digital resources, and other disciplinary tools) and then moves to historiography. General familiarity with the narrative history of the continent is presumed; students wishing to consolidate their command of those themes should expect to do so by consulting texts and/or auditing the undergraduate survey of African history, HIAF 2002.
On the premise that graduate students learn best by doing, members of the colloquium assume primary responsibility for presenting their assessments of selected research materials and readings during the first third of the semester; during the middle third of the term they will lead discussions of readings and develop a substantial historiographical essay for presentation (précis and annotated bibliography), and during the final third of the course they will present a working draft for in-class discussion. The middle portion of the colloquium also considers readings representing recent important developments in modern African history (accommodating student budgets by emphasizing works available in paper editions). From these preparations, they will submit a developed formal historiographical essay to the instructor at the end of the term. The objective of the essay is to gain control of a coherent subfield of modern African history – defined according to each student’s personal academic strategies, in consultation with the instructor – by surveying principal authors and the issues they have raised.
The pedagogical strategy underlying this sequence of exercises allows students to gain familiarity with the basic bibliography of the field and its general historiography and then apply these generalities to specific historical problems of interest to them. Each student thus has the opportunity to emerge from the colloquium with an overview of the sources, methods, and historiography of modern Africa, personal familiarity with selected recent, significant works, and considered knowledge of the literature in the area of their historiographical paper. With such background, students should be prepared to develop a special field in African history for the comprehensive examination in History, utilize historical insight to support primary interests in other disciplines, or to design and teach an undergraduate survey course in the history of modern Africa.
