Lidwien Kapteijns
Elizabeth Kimball Kendall and Elisabeth Hodder Professor of History
African historian focusing on Somalia and Sudan with a long-term research and teaching focus on the history of Africa, the Middle East, and Islam in Africa; translator of historical and popular culture texts in Arabic and Somali.
While my research initially focused on state and society in the late-precolonial Sudan, in recent decades it has focused on Somali history and culture.
- Women’s Voices in a Man’s World (with Maryan Omar Ali, Heinemann, 1999) analyzes constructions of gender in a wide variety of Somali oral texts, including folkloric texts and Somali popular songs of the 1970s and 1980s.
- “Making memories of Mogadishu in Somali poetry about the civil war ” is a chapter in Mediations of Violence in Africa: Fashioning New Futures from Contested Pasts (co-edited with Annemiek Richters, Brill, 2010), and deals with Somali popular culture dealing with the civil war.
- Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) is a history of how the Somali war civil war turned into large-scale clan cleansing. This book was nominated for the African Studies Association's Ogot Prize for East African History in 2014 and is now out in paperback.
- Currently in press is a source publication titled Stringing Coral Beads: The Religious Poetry of Brava (c.1890–1975), co-edited with Alessandra Vianello and Mohamed Kassim (Brill 2018).
I teach African and Middle Eastern history, including survey courses on the history of precolonial and modern Africa, South Africa, and the modern Middle East, as well as a course on Constructions of Gender in the Modern Middle East. I have recently developed a new 200-level course about “Port Cities of the (Western) Indian Ocean” and am working on a new seminar called “Greater Syria, c. 1850-1950.”
After more than thirty years at the College, teaching Wellesley students remains a challenge and a pleasure.
COURSES
HIST263 South Africa in Historical Perspective: Rereading the Past, Re-imagining the Future
HIST264 The History of Pre-Colonial-Africa
HIST265 History of Modern Africa
HIST266 The Indian Ocean as African, Arab, and South Asian History
HIST268 Islamic Africa: A Historical Introduction
HIST293 Changing Gender Constructions in the Modern Middle East
HIST265 Seminar: African History through Public and Popular Culture
HIST364 Seminar: Film and Narratives of Social Change in the Modern Middle East and North Africa
HIST365 Seminar: African History through Public and Popular Culture
HIST366 Seminar: 'Greater Syria' under Ottoman and European Colonial Rule, c. 1850-1950
HIST367 The Indian Ocean as African, Arab, and South Asian History
HIST369 The HIstories of "Ethnic" and "Religious" Violence
Education
- B.A., University of Amsterdam
- M.A., University of London
- Ph.D., University of Amsterdam
Current and upcoming courses
Intertwined with the political history of the modern Middle East are the dramatic cultural and social changes that have shaped how many Middle Easterners live their lives and imagine their futures. This course explores the historical contexts of the changing constructions of femininity and masculinity in different Middle Eastern settings from World War I to the present. Such contexts include nationalist and Islamist movements; economic, ecological, and demographic change; changing conceptions of modernity and tradition, individual and family, and public and private space; and state violence and civil war. Primary sources will focus on the self-representations of Middle Eastern men and women as they engaged with what they considered the major issues of their times.
(HIST 293 and MES 293 are cross-listed courses.)-
This history of Islamic Africa from the seventh to the twentieth century will focus especially on the Saharan and Sudanic belts stretching across the continent from west to east and on the Swahili coast of East Africa. We will study how Islam inspired religious, legal, and political reform (including state-formation) in the precolonial era and shaped responses (including armed resistance) to the establishment of European colonial rule. Other themes include: how Islam influenced African understandings of gender and race; the agency of women and enslaved people in shaping everyday “lived” Islam; and African Muslim men and women’s contributions to a long tradition of knowledge production as well as their diverse, often passionate and artistically accomplished, expressions of faith.
-
A crucial aspect of modern and contemporary international history is the large-scale violence against civilians that has marked recent civil wars throughout the world, from former Yugoslavia to Rwanda, and from Ireland to Sri Lanka and China. Though such violence is often labeled “ethnic” or “religious,” its causes are much broader. This research seminar will focus on: the causes and consequences of both state-perpetrated and communal violence; the scholarly (and legal) debates about how to approach political/social reconstruction in the aftermath of such large-scale violence, and the ethics of the representation of violence by historians and other authors/creators. Drawing on the conceptual readings and case studies of the syllabus, students will design a research paper about a particular conflict chosen by them. (HIST 369 and MES 369 are cross-listed courses.)
-
This course examines the history of interaction of Africans, Arabs, Persians, and South Asians in the coastal regions of East Africa, the Arabian/Persian Gulf, and India, which together enclose the western Indian Ocean. In the period under study (1500 to the present), European imperial expansion and a globalizing economy played an increasingly transformative role. We will read about the port cities connecting these shores; the movements and networks of people; the objects and patterns of trade; the intensifying slave trade; shared environmental and health hazards, and the exchange of legal and commercial practices, and religious and political ideas. (HIST 367 and SAS 367 are cross-listed courses.)