Stephens, Rhiannon

Professor

Office Hours

Fall 2023: ON LEAVE

Education

Ph.D. (History) - Northwestern University, 2007
M.A. (Climate & Society) - Columbia University, 2021
M.A. (History) - Northwestern University, 2002
B.A. Hons. (Swahili & History) - School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2000

Interests and Research

Rhiannon Stephens specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She is the author of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History (Duke University Press, 2022), an interdisciplinary history of how people living in eastern Uganda have sustained and changed their ways of thinking about wealth and poverty over the past two thousand years. Her first monograph, A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), traced the history of motherhood as a social institution and an ideology across over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic and social change. She is the co-editor of Doing Conceptual History in Africa (Berghahn Books, 2018), which critically examines what it means to write conceptual history on the continent. Her current research is a collaborative project that focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa. Her work has been published in the American Historical Review, the Journal of African History, Past and Present, and African Studies Review.

Stephens came to Columbia in 2011, where she has served as in the Arts and Sciences as chair of the Junior Faculty Advisory Board (2018-19) and as chair of the Policy and Planning Committee (2021-22), as well as serving as a member of those and many more committees at the Arts and Sciences and university-wide level. At the graduate level she trains students interested in writing the deep history of Africa using interdisciplinary methods, as well as students working on modern East African history and African gender history. In 2019-20, she was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for exceptional teaching.

Courses

C1020 African Civilization (Global Core)
UN2761 Gender and Sexuality in African History (Global Core)
UN2764 East African History (Global Core)
UN3012 Uganda in the Mission Archive
UN3712 African Climate and History
UN3769 History of Health and Healing in Africa
UN3789 Histories of Poverty in Africa
GR8760 Precolonial African Historiography
GR8761 Historiography of Africa
GR8770 Household and Family in African History

Awards

The Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, 2022-23
Provost’s Grant to Mid-Career Faculty, 2022
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, 2020-2022
Columbia Distinguished Faculty Award, 2020
Heyman Center Fellowship, The Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Columbia University, 2016-17
Honorable Mention, African Studies Association Bethwell A. Ogot Prize for the best book on East African Studies, for A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900, 2014
MacDonald Summer Fellow, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University
Past and Present Society Post-doctoral research fellowship, 2008-09
Presidential Society of Fellows, Northwestern University, 2005-07

Affiliations

Faculty Fellow, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University
Member, African Studies Association
Member, American Historical Association
Member, British Institute in Eastern Africa
Institute of African Studies, Columbia University