Emily Lynn Osborn

Assistant Professor of African History
Ph.D. Stanford University 2000

FIELD SPECIALTIES

African History; Francophone Africa; Gender in Africa; Colonialism; Technology Transfer and Diffusion.

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of Africa interested in using a variety of methodological tools and approaches to studying the African past.  My first book, Making States: Power, Gender, and Colonial Rule in Kankan-Baté, West Africa, 1650 - 1920 (Forthcoming, The Ohio University Press), draws heavily on oral sources to study the history of gender and state-craft in Kankan-Baté, an Islamic state founded in the seventeenth century in present-day Guinea-Conakry and incorporated into the French colonial empire in 1891.  This book traces changes in the way that men and women made states in the precolonial period through periods of peace and warfare;  it then considers how French gender ideologies shaped colonialism and the operation of the colonial state. 

My next book project, Recycling Traditions: Aluminum Casting and the Making of a Modern African Diaspora, is a trans-national social and cultural history of technology transfer and diffusion.  It concentrates specifically on aluminum casting, a technique used by artisans to recycle and melt down scrap aluminum and form it into the stuff of daily life:  cooking pots, spoons, tea-pots and parts for cars and bicycles.  The diffusion of this craft through West Africa in the aftermath of World War II sheds light on an important sector of the informal economy, as well as on the migrations of peoples and ideas in colonial and post-colonial Africa.  I spent the year 2005-2006 conducting research on this project in Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Guinea-Conakry, Mali, Sénégal, and Sierra Leone.

I earned my B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. My research has been supported by Fulbright IIE and Fulbright- Hays fellowships. I was also a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Global Studies at The Johns Hopkins University.  Before coming to the University of Chicago, I taught at the University of Notre Dame.

Teaching Interests

At the University of Chicago, I will teach courses on precolonial and colonial African history, as well as graduate and undergraduate seminars on African historiography;  oral sources of history;   gender and state-craft;  West and Francophone Africa;  and comparative settler societies in Africa. 

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PUBLICATIONS

Making States: Power, Gender, and Colonial Rule in Kankan-Baté, West Africa (Forthcoming, New African History Series, Ohio University Press, 2008)

"Loyalty, Perfidy, and Scandal in Guinée Française: The Noirot-Penda Affair," in Lawrance, Osborn, and Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

Co-Editor and Author, with Richard Roberts and Benjamin Lawrance, "Introduction: Intermediaries and the Making of Colonial Africa," in Lawrance, Osborn, and Roberts, eds., Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

"'Rubber Fever', Commerce, and French Colonial Rule in Upper Guinée, 1890-1913," The Journal of African History, 45:445-65 (2004)

"Circle of Iron: African Colonial Employees and the Interpretation of Colonial Rule in French West Africa," The Journal of African History, 44:27-49 (2003)

Under Review

"Cloaks of Power: Uniforms of Colonial Conquest and Occupation in the Western Soudan and Upper Guinée, 1891-1914"

"Kalifa Sacko of FONCOMA in Bamako, Mali: Aluminum Caster Extraodinaire"

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