A History Professor Dedicated to Both Colleagues and Students

Rhiannon Stephens, who specializes in African history, has won awards for teaching and faculty mentoring.

By
Eve Glasberg
October 03, 2024

Rhiannon Stephens specializes in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the 20th century. She is the author of several books, including Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History,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, and A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900, which traces the history of motherhood as a social institution and an ideology over a millennium of Ugandan political, economic, and social change.

Stephens arrived at Columbia in 2011, where she has served in the Arts and Sciences as chair of the Junior Faculty Advisory Board, and as chair of the Policy and Planning Committee, as well as being a member of many other committees in Arts and Sciences and at the University-wide level. Stephens is deeply committed to working with both her faculty colleagues and her students; in 2019-20, she was awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for exceptional teaching.

Columbia News caught up with Stephens recently to discuss her research and her teaching, along with advice she has for students who intend to pursue a career in academia.

As a recipient of the 2024 Faculty Mentoring Award, what does this mean to you? 

This award is so meaningful because it tells me that the effort I make to be a resource for my colleagues is important, and has a positive impact on their working lives at Columbia. What I hope to achieve through the mentoring work I do is to make other peoples’ experiences a little easier and smoother, even as they navigate tenure and other reviews that are necessarily stressful. To have been nominated by some of the colleagues I work with made this recognition even more significant for me.

What was your path to a career as a professor and historian of Africa?

My BA was in Swahili and African History at the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London, so I was already interested in the continent and its languages and history. What struck me at that time, though, was that so few historians of Africa were researching and writing about its history before European colonialism of the late 19th century. This had the (unintentional) effect of reinforcing perceptions that anything that happened before colonial conquest existed in the realm of prehistory.

I then went to Northwestern University to train in the interdisciplinary methods that make it possible to research and write about the history of societies without written records. My PhD dissertation focused on gender history in Uganda from the late first millennium to the end of the 19th century, drawing on evidence from comparative historical linguistics, oral traditions, and comparative ethnography, as well as written sources produced from the mid-19th century on.

I have continued to work across disciplinary boundaries to write the history of economic concepts over the past two millennia in eastern Uganda. Recently, I completed an MA in Climate and Society at the Columbia Climate School so that I could draw on evidence about the climate in East Africa’s past as part of my research into the region’s history.

What are you teaching this semester?

I’m teaching an undergraduate lecture class on the history of gender and sexuality in Africa. In the class we explore how gender and sexuality have shaped key historical developments on the continent, and how those categories have varied across time and space.

I’m also co-teaching (with Jason Smerdon from Columbia Climate School) an undergraduate seminar on African climate and history. In that class, we look at how Africa’s climate has changed in the Common Era, and with what consequences for the people living there. Using case studies, we work to understand the climatology underlying them, their environmental expressions, and their social history, meaning how people experienced and responded to changes in the climate.

How do you balance the demands of your own projects/research and teaching?

Keeping up with research and writing during the semester alongside teaching can be tricky, but I try to set aside some time every week to do so because I find that the two kinds of work complement each other. Teaching African history to students generates new questions for my research, and moving forward in my research allows me to introduce new concepts and ideas into my teaching. For example, this semester’s class with Jason Smerdon has grown directly out of our research collaborations.

What are you working on now?

My main research currently is a collaborative project focused on the intersections of gender, power, and climate on the Swahili coast of East Africa from around 500 CE to 1900 CE. Whereas in the past I have worked across disciplinary boundaries but on projects where I was the sole lead researcher, this venture is a team effort with colleagues across history, archaeology, and paleoclimatology. The undertaking brings into focus the role of historical climate change by asking how climate events—such as fluctuations in precipitation or sea-surface temperatures—shaped practices of production that shifted access to resources along gender lines, and how that influenced political authority.

By examining economic and social pressures and opportunities affected by climate events, we aim to better incorporate women and non-elite people into our analysis of the East African coast’s long history. As part of this, my principal collaborator, Adria LaViolette from the University of Virginia, and I were in Zanzibar this past summer with a small team, including researchers from Zanzibar and U.S. doctoral programs, to do preliminary archaeological work.

I’m also continuing work, with Jason Smerdon, on a prolonged period of drought, which spanned the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries in East Africa. We’re bringing together evidence from oral traditions and archaeology with climate reconstructions to better understand the droughts from climatological and human perspectives.

Advice for anyone pursuing a career similar to yours?

I work across disciplines—drawing on evidence from linguistics, history, archaeology, ethnography, and paleoclimatology. So I suggest being open to finding possible answers to the questions you’re asking in a discipline other than the one you’re in. And be willing not only to talk to people in different disciplines, but to really work to understand those disciplines, as well as the questions that guide them and the research that is produced within them. 

What's the best thing about teaching at Columbia?

The absolute best thing about teaching here is the students: At all levels, they are engaged and enthusiastic. They also challenge me to think again and more deeply about the subjects and materials I teach and write about.