Lidwien Kapteijns

Lidwien Kapteijns is Kendall/Hodder Professor of History at Wellesley College, teaching African and Middle Eastern History in the Department of History. She teaches courses on the history of precolonial and modern Africa, South Africa, and the early and modern Middle East. She teaches seminars, "Women, Work and the Family in African History" and "Women in Islamic Society." She is also one of the faculty members teaching "The Making of the Modern World Order," a requirement for international relations students.

Prof. Kapteijns has two research areas. She started out as a Sudanist and lived and worked in the Sudan, where she taught at the University of Khartoum (1977-1981). For her first book, she did extensive fieldwork in Western Darfur, the area that is currently in the news because of the ethnocidal violence there. Her work on Sudanese history focused on late precolonial states in western Darfur. She also edited and published a number of source publications, Arabic historical documents with English translations.

During her M.A. studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Prof. Kapteijns studied Somali language and literature. In 1986 she returned to the study of Somali history and oral literature, which is where her major research interests currently lie. She co-edits a journal called Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies and has co-authored a book (with Maryan Omar Ali) that deals with Somali oral texts from the colonial period to 1980. It is called Women’s Voices in a Man’s World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature, c. 1899-1980 (Greenwood/Heinemann, 1999). She is currently working on a project called “Somali Popular Culture and the Changing National Imaginary, 1960-present.” As Somalia has been in civil war for much of the last 20 years, she did her fieldwork for this book in the Republic of Djibouti, also in northeast Africa.

Prof. Kapteijns has held a number of administrative positions at Wellesley College: she chaired Women’s Studies, the Peace & Justice Program, and the History Department. She has also served as Faculty Director of Internships and Service Learning since 2003.

She co-founded the Somali Institute for Research and Development (SIRAD), a small non-profit organizing public forums, in Somali, for the Somali community of Boston (siradinc@comcadst.net).

She has published widely about the history of Sudan and Somalia. Her books include:

• Women's Voices in a Man's Word: Women and the Somali Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature, c. 1899-1988. Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH, 1999.
• An Islamic Alliance: Ali Dinar and the Sanusiyya, 1906-1916 (with Jay Spaulding). Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994.
• After the Millennium: Diplomatic Correspondence from Wadai and Dar Fur on the Eve of Colonial Conquest, 1885-1916 (with Jay Spaulding), East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1988.
• Mahdist Faith and Sudanic Tradition: The History of the Masalit Sultanate, 1970-1930. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Since 1994, she has been actively involved with the Somali community in Boston.

Profile last updated: 1/07