Dr. Rhiannon Stephens

BIOGRAPHY:

Rhiannon Stephens is a Professor of History at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. Her research focuses in particular on gender, economic difference and political organisation. She has written on the history of motherhood and its intersection with politics and economics in precolonial Uganda and on the history of poverty and wealth as economic and social concepts in Uganda over the past two thousand years. Most recently, her research has turned to engaging with historical climate change and how East African communities responded to the challenges and opportunities it posed. She is now working on a collaborative project on the entanged histories of gender, power and climate on the Swahili coast of East Africa. She is the co-leader (with Jason Smerdon) of the Environmental Sciences and Humanities Cluster at the Center for Science and Society at Columbia University. She is a faculty affiliate at The Earth Institute, the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. Her work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, Past and Present, and African Studies Review.