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Heike Schmidt

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Director of Dissertations

Areas of interest

My passion for Africa began during a study abroad year at the University of Zimbabwe. I have since become a historian of modern Africa, with my area of specialty being the history of Southern as well as East Africa, in particular Zimbabwe and Tanzania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have always had a decolonising approach to my research, teaching, and to my citizenship at my workplace. Currently, I am shifting my research agenda - not least taking accountability for my own positionality as a white European historian of African lives - to race and white privilege. My research and my publications are rooted in extensive fieldwork which includes undertaking oral history interviews as well as archival studies in Africa.

  • gender
  • violence & conflict
  • race & white privilege
  • nation & nationalism
  • compared colonialisms
  • religion
  • memory

Postgraduate supervision

Current supervision

  • Richard Balzano - Oil, Aid, and Human Rights: U.S.-Guatemalan Relations and the Political Economy of National Interest, 1979-1983
  • Noel Mutasa - Decrypting the single narrative of Zimbabwe’s liberation history: An erudite revisit of Ndabaningi Sithole, the Nhari Rebellion, Mgagao Declaration and the Vashandi Group, 1974 to 1979
  • Shepherd Mutswiri - A Negotiated settlement: Faith, Nationalism, and Women’s Political Imagination in the Decolonisation of Zimbabwe, 1960 to 1980

Previous supervision

  • Bethany Rebisz (AHRC SWW DTP funded)- Losing the Hearts and Minds: The Role of Aid in Counter-Insurgency Warfare in Kenya, 1952-1960

Postgraduate research teaching/skills

I welcome PhD students in Modern African History. I encourage especially those intending to research Southern or East Africa who are interested in gender or conflict.

Teaching

Undergraduate

  • Year One – The Rwanda Genocide of 1994
  • Year One – Exploring Evidence (co-taught): An African History of British Colonialism in Kenya
  • Year One – People in History (co-taught): Race, Age, and Gender in the Second South African War, 1899 to 1902 and Nation and Nationalism
  • Year Two – The Colonial Experience, Africa 1879 to 1980
  • Year Three – Africa from European Settlement to Nelson Mandela (South Africa and Zimbabwe)
  • Year Three Special Subject – Gender in Africa
  • Year Three – Dissertation Supervision

Postgraduate MA (postgraduate taught)

  • Option – Violence and Conflict in Twentieth Century Africa
  • Theory and Themes – Postcolonial History
  • Independent Study Supervision
  • Dissertation Supervision 
 

Research centres and groups

  • Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Websites/blogs

Selected publications

 

Impact and public engagement

Television interviews – Al Jazeera ‘Inside Story’, France 24, ITV ‘Good Morning Britain’, ORF (Austria), 3SAT (Germany), Sky News, TRT World.

Radio interviews – LBC.

The Conversation articles

Publications

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