Emily Lynn Osborn, University of Chicago

Profile photo of Emily Lynn Osborn, expert at University of Chicago

Associate Professor Chicago, Illinois eosborn1@uchicago.edu Office: (773) 834-9019

Bio/Research

I am a historian of Africa interested in using a variety of methodological tools and sources to study the African past. My first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (The Ohio University Press), investigate...

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Bio/Research

I am a historian of Africa interested in using a variety of methodological tools and sources to study the African past. My first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (The Ohio University Press), investigates a central puzzle in West African political history: why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with the French colonial occupation of the late-nineteenth century? I argue that this puzzle can be solved by analyzing the relationship of the household to state. In undertaking this investigation in Kankan, which is located in Guinea-Conakry, West Africa, this book brings gender analysis to the study of precolonial and colonial state-making, while it also breaks the conventional divide between social and political history.

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