Derek Peterson Speaker & Booking Information

Derek R. Peterson is professor in the History Department and the Department of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. His early scholarly work was about the history of African-language literature in Kenya; later he wrote a prize-winning book about the East African Revival, a Christian conversion movement that challenged cultural nationalists’ control over civic life. With funding from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities he is currently working on a new book about the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. In 2016 Peterson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in African Studies and elected Fellow of the British Academy. In 2017 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

From 2004 to 2009 Peterson was Director of the African Studies Centre and Fellow of Selwyn College at Cambridge University. During Peterson’s directorship the Centre launched the ‘Cambridge-Africa Collaborative Research Programme’, which (with funding from the Leverhulme Trust) annually brought six or seven Africa-based scholars to Cambridge to work on overlapping research projects. In 2008 the Ohio University Press launched the ‘Cambridge African Studies Centre’ book series as a means of bringing fellows’ scholarship to public notice. Peterson edits the series with Cambridge colleagues Harri Englund and Chris Warnes.

At the University of Michigan Peterson has been very much involved in the African Studies Center, acting at various times as Associate Director, Director pro tempore, and Coordinator of the African Heritage Initiative, a working group that brings humanities scholars in Michigan together with colleagues in Ghana, South Africa and elsewhere. The African Heritage Initiative has coordinated a number of workshops, including a large international conference in Accra in December 2009 (with the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana) and, in July 2011, a scholarly meeting at Museum Africa in Johannesburg. All of this resulted in the publication of Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool, eds., The Politics of Heritage in Africa (Cambridge UP, 2015).

Peterson is the principal investigator for a $1.5 million grant awarded by the Mellon Foundation to the U-M African Studies Center and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (South Africa). The program–entitled ‘Rethinking the Humanities in Africa: A Transnational Collaboration‘–is meant to draw students and faculty from Michigan and Wits into shared research projects. Peterson organised (with Daniel Herwitz) a November 2014 conference on ‘African Studies in the Digital Age’ in Ann Arbor; in June 2016 Peterson coordinated a conference in Johannesburg on ‘African Print Cultures’ (with Isabel Hofmeyr).

With financial support from the Center for Research Libraries and the U-M African Studies Center, Peterson oversees an ongoing effort to organize and preserve endangered government archives in Uganda. The project–which is described elsewhere on this site–is based at Mountains of the Moon University in western Uganda. Over the course of eight years seven archival collections have been organised and catalogued, including the papers of Jinja District, Kabale District, Kabarole District, and Hoima District. Several of these archives have been brought into the university’s collections and made available for scholars’ and citizens’ use.