Allen Isaacman

Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1970

I have spent the past thirty years conducting research and teaching in the field of African history. My research has focused on pre-colonial and colonial Southern Africa with particular emphasis on the social history of Mozambique. I have written extensively on four broad themes: (1) the colonial encounter; (2) slavery and maroon communities; (3) the nature of African resistance to European colonial domination; (4) peasants, agrarian change, and rural protest.

Most recently I have been engaged in a long term project on the environmental and social history of the building of Cahora Bassa dam. My writings and teaching stress the agency of ordinary people -- women and men, young and old, peasants and workers -- whose history, all too often, has been rendered invisible and whose voices have been rendered inaudible. Both in my courses and research I set the importance of collecting and critically analyzing oral histories as well as reading more traditional sources against the grain and learning to listen for silences in historical texts.

In addition to my responsibilities in the Department of History, I direct the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change/MacArthur Program, which focuses on issues such as identity politics, effective democratization, sustainability, and gender and globalization with a particular emphasis on the Third World.

Recent Publications

"Toward a Social and Environmental History of the Building of Cahora Bassa Dam," Journal of Southern African Studies (2000).

Historical Amnesia, or the Logic of Capital Accumulation: Cotton Production in Colonial and Post Colonial Mozambique," Society and Space 15 (1997): 757-790.

Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938-1961 (Portsmouth: Heinemann,1996).

The above text was taken from the University of Minnesota's History Department's web site (http://www.hist.umn.edu).