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 articlesHeike Schmidt
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+44 (0) 118 378 6543
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Associate Professor
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
'The German Empire and Its Legacies: Queer Men, Sexual Crime, and the Imperative of Colonial Hegemony in the German Empire.' In Colonialisms and Queer Politics: Sexualities, Genders and Unsettling Colonialities, eds Sonia Corrêa, Gustavo Gomes da Costa Santos, and Matthew Waites. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.
Colonialism and Violence in Zimbabwe: A History of Suffering. Oxford &
Harare: James Currey & Weaver, 2013.
African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, edited with
Jan-Georg Deutsch and Peter Probst. Oxford and Portsmouth/NH: James Currey and
Heinemann, 2002.
Impact and public engagement