 Steve Fabian
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Dalhousie University, 2007
E315 Thompson Hall
Office Phone: 716/673-3875
E-mail: steven.fabian@fredonia.edu
Research Interests:
Thematically, I am interested in the development of African identities. The predominant way of identifying Africans is by ethnic, or "tribal", association in rural areas; my aim is to complicate this understanding by investigating ways Africans identified themselves in cities. My research examines how peoples of diverse social, ethnic, and racial backgrounds built bridges with each other in urban settings to create a sense of community. I emphasize precolonial African cities, reversing the usual framework in African urban scholarship which follows the migration of rural Africans to the cities the Europeans designed. From this angle, we see what happens when Europeans migrate to the cities the Africans built. My immediate future research is a small project entitled The People of War, examining a martial African society known by other Africans as the Maviti. I am also interested in African transport history, particularly buses – the main system of public transportation in Africa – and examining the development of new social identities as diverse peoples intermingle along transportation routes and stations.
Publications:
"Locating the Local in the Coastal Rebellion of 1888-90" Journal of Eastern African Studies, forthcoming, 2013.
"East Africa's Gorée: Slave Trade and Slave Tourism in Bagamoyo, Tanzania" Canadian Journal of African Studies, forthcoming, 2013.
"Journey Out of Darkness? Images of Africa in American Travelogues at the Turn of the Millenium" Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26:6, 2012.
"Ali Hassan Mwinyi" in Emmanuel Akyeampong & Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Dictionary of African Biography Oxford University Press, 2011
"Curing the Cancer of the Colony: Bagamoyo, Dar es Salaam and Socioeconomic Struggle in German East Africa, 1860s-1907" International Journal of African Historical Studies (40:3) 2007.
Teaching Interests:
African History, including Africa to 1880, Africa since 1880, History of South Africa, History of African Cities, Conflict and Crises in African History, and World History since 1500.
|
