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., Universiteit van Amsterdam
- M.A., University of London
- Doctoraal, Universiteit van Amsterdam
- Ph.D., Universiteit van 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 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.)
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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 266 and SAS 266 are cross-listed courses.)