St Cross College, Oxford

MA (BA Sussex; PhD Cantab); University Lecturer in African Politics

Professor David AndersonE-mail: david.anderson

Department Website

Professor Anderson’s long-standing interest in the history and politics of eastern Africa is reflected in a range of current research projects. His work on the transnational political economy of khat was completed recently, and a monograph is to be published shortly, The Khat Controversy, and he hopes to undertake further work on aspects of drugs consumption and trafficking in Africa. He continues to research and write on the theme of state violence and its consequences, to be seen in his latest essays on the Mau Mau war, on majimboist politics, and on vigilante movements and their links to political violence. This theme will be developed in a rather different way in his latest project, which is a general book on the history of the Cold War in Africa.

Anderson also participates in a number of collaborations with other Africanist scholars here at Oxford. He is engaged, with his St Cross colleague Dr Sloan Mahone, in an AHRC-funded project on ‘Trauma and Personhood in Late Colonial Kenya’. A project on the Kenya elections of 2007 has been devised, in collaboration with Mr Nicolas Cheeseman (New College), and will begin at the end of 2006 if funding can be obtained. A further project is planned on landscape and environment in the Omo Valley of southern Ethiopia (with Dr David Turton), this developing the themes Anderson last explored in his work Eroding the Commons (2002).

As Tutor for the MSc in African Studies, David Anderson takes a leading role in the teaching of the Core Course on ‘Themes in History and the Social Sciences in Africa’, and offers an Optional Paper on ‘Violence and Historical Memory in Eastern Africa’. This Optional Paper, which is taught in collaboration with Dr Jocelyn Alexander (Linacre), is also popular with students from the MPhil and MSc degrees in Development Studies, Politics and History.

Professor Anderson is a very active supervisor of doctoral students. Most of these students are drawn from the disciplines of Politics and History, but others are based in Anthropology or Development Studies. Over the past three years his students have undertaken research in a wide range of African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Liberia,

Nigeria, and South Africa.