Lidwien Kapteijns

Elizabeth Kimball Kendall and Elisabeth Hodder Professor of History

African historian focusing on Somalia and Sudan with a long-term research and teaching focus on the history of Africa, the Middle East, and Islam in Africa; translator of historical and popular culture texts in Arabic and Somali.

While my research initially focused on state and society in the late-precolonial Sudan, in recent decades it has focused on Somali history and culture.

  • Women’s Voices in a Man’s World (with Maryan Omar Ali, Heinemann, 1999) analyzes constructions of gender in a wide variety of Somali oral texts, including folkloric texts and Somali popular songs of the 1970s and 1980s.
  • “Making memories of Mogadishu in Somali poetry about the civil war ” is a chapter in Mediations of Violence in Africa: Fashioning New Futures from Contested Pasts (co-edited with Annemiek Richters, Brill, 2010), and deals with Somali popular culture dealing with the civil war.
  • Clan Cleansing in Somalia: The Ruinous Legacy of 1991 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) is a history of how the Somali war civil war turned into large-scale clan cleansing. This book was nominated for the African Studies Association's Ogot Prize for East African History in 2014 and is now out in paperback.
  • Currently in press is a source publication titled Stringing Coral Beads: The Religious Poetry of Brava (c.1890–1975), co-edited with Alessandra Vianello and Mohamed Kassim (Brill 2018).

I teach African and Middle Eastern history, including survey courses on the history of precolonial and modern Africa, South Africa, and the modern Middle East, as well as a course on Constructions of Gender in the Modern Middle East. I have recently developed a new 200-level course about “Port Cities of the (Western) Indian Ocean” and am working on a new seminar called “Greater Syria, c. 1850-1950.”

After more than thirty years at the College, teaching Wellesley students remains a challenge and a pleasure.

COURSES

HIST263 South Africa in Historical Perspective: Rereading the Past, Re-imagining the Future

HIST264 The History of Pre-Colonial-Africa

HIST265 History of Modern Africa

HIST266 The Indian Ocean as African, Arab, and South Asian History

HIST268 Islamic Africa: A Historical Introduction

HIST293 Changing Gender Constructions in the Modern Middle East

HIST265 Seminar: African History through Public and Popular Culture

HIST364 Seminar: Film and Narratives of Social Change in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

HIST365 Seminar: African History through Public and Popular Culture

HIST366 Seminar: 'Greater Syria' under Ottoman and European Colonial Rule, c. 1850-1950

HIST367 The Indian Ocean as African, Arab, and South Asian History

HIST369 The HIstories of "Ethnic" and "Religious" Violence

Education

  • B.A., University of Amsterdam
  • M.A., University of London
  • Ph.D., University of Amsterdam

Current and upcoming courses

  • A crucial aspect of modern and contemporary international history is the large-scale violence against civilians that has marked recent civil wars throughout the world, from former Yugoslavia to Rwanda, and from Ireland to Sri Lanka and China. Though such violence is often labeled “ethnic” or “religious,” its causes are much broader. This research seminar will focus on: the causes and consequences of both state-perpetrated and communal violence; the scholarly (and legal) debates about how to approach political/social reconstruction in the aftermath of such large-scale violence, and the ethics of the representation of violence by historians and other authors/creators. Drawing on the conceptual readings and case studies of the syllabus, students will design a research paper about a particular conflict chosen by them. (HIST 369 and MES 369 are cross-listed courses.)