Professor and Chair

jmonson1@macalester.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Jamie Monson became interested in Africa when she served as an agriculture volunteer for the Peace Corps in rural Kenya in 1980. She then completed her PhD in African History at UCLA, and took her first teaching position at Carleton College in 1991. She teaches general African history, African environmental history and courses on memory and narrative. Monson’s early research focus was on agricultural and environmental history of southern Tanzania, and she has also worked on anti-colonial warfare in German East Africa.  In the late 1990s, she began a new research project on the history of the TAZARA railway, built with Chinese development aid in Tanzania and Zambia in the 1960s and 1970s. Her book, "Africa's Freedom Railway," was just published by Indiana University Press this spring.  

For the last two years, Monson has been studying the history of China-Africa relations (and learning Chinese), and she just returned from 14 months of research in China. Her new project is a study of technology transfer in the history of Chinese development assistance to Africa. A second project that she has also just begun uses records of visits made by African women's delegations to China during the Cultural Revolution to examine gendered aspects of civil diplomacy. In addition to these research interests, she also teaches courses and workshops on the ethics of civic engagement, most recently this summer in Myanmar (Burma).