Rhiannon Stephens

Rhiannon Stephens is professor of history.  Her research focuses on the deep history of East Africa, in particular on questions of gender, and social and economic difference over the past two thousand years.  She uses interdisciplinary methods to write the history of oral societies, drawing on evidence from comparative historical linguistics, archaeology, oral traditions, and paleoclimatology.  

She is the author most recently of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), a history of economic concepts in eastern Uganda.  Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced motherhood as a social institution and as an ideology over more than a millennium of Ugandan political, economic, and social change.  She is the co-editor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa (Berghahn Books, 2018), which critically examines what it means to write conceptual history on the African continent.  Her current research is a collaborative project that focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa.  Her work has been published in the American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, Past and Present, and African Studies Review.  

Stephens came to Columbia in 2011, where she has served in the Arts and Sciences as chair of the Junior Faculty Advisory Board (2018-19) and as chair of the Policy and Planning Committee (2021-22), as well as serving on those and many more committees at the Arts and Sciences and the university-wide level.

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