Welcome!


I am a historian of modern African and global history at the National Institute of Education (part of the Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. I specialize in histories of race, development, and decolonization in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in 20th Century West Africa (forthcoming 2026, with Cambridge University Press) explores how schooling came to be imagined as part of larger projects of emancipation. Rejecting colonial exploitation of the African body, proponents of anticolonial development instead claimed the mind as the site of economic productivity for African people.

As is so often the case, the research for my book prompted many more questions than answers. I am currently developing three new research projects, which speak to these unanswered questions and further my interests in histories of race, economic thought, and the Atlantic world. I welcome conversations, questions, and potential collaboration regarding any of the projects below.

The first is called When Economists Discovered Education: Growth, Freedom and Development in the Postcolonial World (1955–1975). This project examines the ways that economistic thinking began to be applied to global education in the 1950s and 1960s. Moving beyond a US-centric approach, it interrogates how the 'human capital revolution' intersected with decolonization to shape development practices--and the backlash they generated--in the 1960s and 1970s.

The second, Race, Education and Empire: New Histories of Race in Colonial Schooling, will bring together new work that interrogates race as an analytical lens in its study of colonial education. Rather than assuming the categories of colonizer/colonized, this work questions how ideas of race and hierarchy are produced, how they circulate, and how they are enacted in colonial education. It puts an emphasis on the ways that people in colonial spaces experienced racial ideas, and how they engaged with them.

The third, and most ambitious, is tentatively titled Black Atlantic Histories of Africa. It asks, how did emancipations across the Black Atlantic — from Brazil to Virginia — shape African visions of the past and hopes for the future? I am interested in exploring how the “emancipation moment” in the Black Atlantic (across the whole range of Atlantic imperial spheres (British, French, Portuguese, and Spanish) intersected with African history.

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