Faculty

Moses Ochonu
Associate Professor of History

PhD, Michigan, 2004

Modern Sub-Saharan Africa; colonialism; postcolonial developments; political economy; African social and economic history.

Telephone: 615-322-3388
Email: Moses.ochonu@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: On leave 2012-2013
Office: 220 Benson Hall

 

Moses Ochonu specializes in the modern history of Sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the colonial and and postcolonial periods. Although he teaches survey and topical classes on all regions of Africa (and on all periods), his research interest lies in Nigeria. Moses Ochonu has been awarded a major fellowship by the American Council of Learned Societies for the 2012-13 academic year in support of his ongoing research. He has published several articles and review essays in peer-reviewed journals and as book chapters on a range of subjects and periods in Nigerian and African history. His Op-Ed "The Dilemmas of Explaining Africa" appeared in The Chronicle Review/ The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 18, 2008). His first book is Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigerian in the Great Depression, (Ohio University Press, 2009). He is working on his second book, a socio-political and relational history of the long, complex, dynamic interactions between the Sokoto Caliphate and the inheritors of its legacies on the one hand and the non-Muslim communities located on its frontiers on the other. The project looks at the non-Muslim communities’ multidimensional relationship with the Caliphate as subalterns, the superimposition of British colonialism on a precarious relational status quo, and the gradual and convoluted development of a Middle Belt, non-Muslim consciousness to counter a perceived “Anglo-Fulani” hegemony. The project has been supported by a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant and by a Vanderbilt University Scholars Research grant. With support from a separate grant from the Vanderbilt Research Scholars Fellowship, Dr. Ochonu has been gathering materials for another project that analyzes the travel narratives of Nigerian travelers to Britain in colonial and postcolonial times. He hopes to use these texts to enter scholarly conversations on the discursive and demographic aspects of African diasporic imaginations in/on Europe and on representations of the metropole in the experiential discourses of colonized peoples.