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
Seminar: From Casablanca to Cape Town: African Popular and Public Cultures
HIST365
This research seminar purposefully brings Africa north and south of the Sahara into a unified frame of study. It focuses on African cultural expressions such as music, song, literature, fashion, photography and film, digital creations, museums, and architecture in the period 1900 to the present. The themes structuring the syllabus are: colonialism, nationalism, and modernity; constructions of gender; identities, and the changing environment. You will learn about important concepts and themes in African historiography and cultural studies, and a wide range of relevant texts. Explorations of African subjectivities and narrative agency in all their complexity are central to the intellectual trajectory of this class. Research papers will engage with a particular kind of text or form of African culture across regions.
(HIST 365 and MES 368 are cross-listed courses.)-
The Middle East in Modern History
HIST284
This course provides a survey of Middle Eastern history from c. 1900 to the present, with an emphasis on the Arab Middle East. Its main objective is to help you gain insight into the historical backgrounds and contexts of the broad political developments of this period: the demise of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I; the Armenian genocide; the establishment of European “Mandates” in most of the Arab world and the nationalist struggles for independence that ensued; the establishment of Israel and the expulsion and exodus of Palestinians in 1948; the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-1990; the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the emergence of Islamist political movements in other parts of the Middle East; the regime of Saddam Hussein, the first Gulf War of 1991; the failure of the Oslo peace process of 1993-1995, the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories except Gaza, the rise of HAMAS; the U.S. invasion and the ensuing civil war in Iraq; the devastation of war and oppression in Syria, and deepening autocracy in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran.