John Lonsdale

Region of Interest

Africa

Primary Country of Residence

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Title

Fellow of Trinity College

Affiliation

Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK

Email

jml1001@cam.ac.uk

Mailing Address

University Reader in African History
Trinity College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge
CB2 1TQ
United Kingdom

Countries of Specialization

Kenya

Research Interests

Major research interest: the social, cultural, economic, religious, and
political history of 20th century Kenya. Special interests in the
moral/social constructions of ethnic patriotisms, nationalism, and religious
community.

Publications

2003

(a) With Atieno Odhiambo. _Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, Authority &
Narration_ (James Currey, Oxford; EAEP, Nairobi; Ohio UP, Athens OH), xvi +
307 pp. With Introduction.

(b) Authority, Gender & Violence: The War within Mau Mau's Fight for
Freedom, ch 3 in Edited book, above, 34-72.

(c) 'Le cas Kenyan: Un débat moral et politique', _Politique
Africaine_ 90, 17-36.

2002

(a) 'Kikuyu Christianities: A history of intimate diversity' ch. 6 in
D Maxwell & I Lawrie (eds), _Christianity & the African Imagination_ (Brill,
Leiden), 157-97.

(b) Contests of time: Kikuyu historiography, old and new, ch. 9 in
A Harneit-Sievers (ed.), A Place in the World: new local historiographies
from Africa & S Asia (Brill, Leiden), 201-54.

(c) Globalization, ethnicity, and democracy: a view from "the Hopeless
Continent", ch. 9 in A G Hopkins (ed.), Globalization in World History
(Random House, London), 194-219.

(d) Mission Christianity & settler colonialism in eastern Africa, ch. 15 in
H Hansen & M Twaddle (eds.), _Christian Missionaries & the State in the
Third World_ (Currey, Oxford), 194-211.

(e) Jomo Kenyatta, God, and the Modern World, ch. 3 in J-G Deutsch et al
(eds.), African Modernities (Currey, Oxford & Heinemann, Portsmouth NH),
31-65.

(f) Foreword to Gideon G Githiga, The Church as a Bulwark against
Authoritarianism in Kenya 1963-92 (Uzima Press, Nairobi), xi-xii.

(g) Town life in colonial Kenya9, in A Burton (ed.), The Urban Experience in
Eastern Africa (British Institute, Nairobi), 207-22.

(h) Bethwell Ogot: The liberal jabilo, in Toyin Falola & Atieno Odhiambo
(eds.), The Challenges of History & Leadership in Africa: The Essays of
Bethwell A Ogot (Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ), lxi-lxvi.

2000

(a) 'Kenyatta's trials: breaking and making an African nationalist', ch 10
in _The moral world of the law_, ed. Peter Coss (Cambridge UP for Past &
Present Society), 196-239.

(b) 'Agency in tight corners: narrative and initiative in African
history', Editorial, pp. 5-16, in J Lonsdale's guest-edited issue of
_Jl of African Cultural Studies_ 13, 1 in honour of Terence Ranger.

(c) 'KAU's cultures: imaginations of community & constructions of leadership
in Kenya after the second world war' in ibid, 107-25.

Other recent projects:

1) with Bruce Berman of Queen's U, Kingston, Ontario: the intellectual
and political biographies of Jomo Kenyatta and Louis Leakey.

2) with David Throup: 3-volume edition of documents on the decolonisation
of Kenya, 1944-1963, in the British Documents on the End of Empire Project
(BDEEP).

3) _The bones of Waiyaki_ designed as a class-discussion text, with
primary sources, on the making of a disputed local history in central
Kenya, 1890 to the present day.

Keywords

political history ; political economy ; culture ; religion ; ethnic patriotism.