Professor Richard Reid

Professor Richard Reid

Professor of African History

Fellow
 

I am a historian of modern Africa, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  I am particularly interested in the culture and practice of warfare in the modern period, and have focused on the transformations in violence in the late precolonial period (the nineteenth century), as well as on more recent armed insurgencies, especially those between the 1950s and the 1980s. I also work on historical culture and memory, especially around trauma and upheaval, and one strand of my research involves an exploration of how the ‘precolonial’ is perceived and understood in modern Africa (as well as in modern Europe). While some of my published work spans the continent as a whole, my primary research is on East and Northeast Africa, including Uganda and the Great Lakes region, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.