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Brian PetersonAssociate Professor Contact Information: |
Teaching and Research Interests
Brian Peterson is a social and cultural historian working on francophone West Africa and Muslim societies in Africa. His current research focuses on the social history of French colonialism, with an emphasis on the history of Islam, processes of religious change, slave emancipation, labor migration, and agrarian and environmental change. His first book,
Selected Publications
Islamization from Below: The Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan, 1880-1960 (Yale University Press, 2011)
The colonial era in Africa, spanning less than a century, ushered in a more rapid expansion of Islam than at any time during the previous thousand years. In this groundbreaking historical investigation, Brian Peterson considers for the first time how and why rural peoples in West Africa "became Muslim" under French colonialism.
Peterson rejects conventional interpretations that emphasize the roles of states, jihads, and elites in "converting" people, arguing instead that the expansion of Islam owed its success to the mobility of thousands of rural people who gradually, and usually peacefully, adopted the new religion on their own. Based on extensive fieldwork in villages across southern Mali (formerly French Sudan) and on archival research in West Africa and France, the book draws a detailed new portrait of grassroots, multi-generational processes of Islamization in French Sudan while also deepening our understanding of the impact and unintended consequences of colonialism.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300152708
http://www.amazon.com/Islamization-Below-Making-Communities-1880-1960/dp/0300152701
“History, Memory and the Legacy of Samori in Southern Mali, c. 1882-1898,” Journal of African History, 49 (Cambridge, 2008)
“Slave Emancipation, Trans-local Social Processes and the Spread of Islam in French Colonial Buguni (Southern Mali), 1893-1914,” Journal of African History, 45 (Cambridge, 2004)
“Quantifying Conversion: A Note on the Colonial Census and Religious Change in Postwar Southern Mali,” History in Africa 29 (2002), 381-392
Grants, Awards, and Fellowships:
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor, Union College, 2007-2008
Humanities Development Grant, Union College, 2007-2008
Arthur and Mary Wright Prize, Dissertation Award, Yale University Graduate School, 2005
Guggenheim Dissertation Fellowship, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, 2004-2005
James C. Brady Dissertation Fellowship, Yale University Graduate School, 2003-2004
Fulbright Program Dissertation Fellowship (Mali), U.S. Department of State, 2001-2002
H. R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, Research Grant, Yale University, 2003
Foreign Language and Area Studies, US Department of Education, African languages, 1999-2000
Yale Center for International and Area Studies, Dissertation Research Grant, 2003-2004