Frederick Cooper
Professor of History
Yale University, PhD 1974
Office Address:
King Juan Carlos Center, Room 708
Email:
Phone:
212-998-8606
Field of Study:
Africa
Areas of Research/Interest:
Modern Africa; empires in world history; colonization and decolonization; the social sciences and the colonial situation
Bio
Frederick Cooper's early research focused on questions of slavery and labor in 19th- and 20th- century East Africa, the subject of a trilogy of his books. In studying interaction and conflict in specific locations, he became increasingly interested in the shifting nature of colonial thinking and practices that went into these processes. This new direction led to a book on the relationship of social change and conflict to decolonization in French and British Africa as well as a comparative project begun in the late 1980s with anthropologist Ann Stoler. Cooper and Stoler organized an international conference on colonialism in 1989 and published an edited book, Tensions of Empire, in 1997. Cooper's interest in social theory led him to write a series of articles critical of some of the key concepts widely used in the social sciences and humanities–identity, modernity, and globalization. These and other essays have been collected in his book Colonialism in Question; he also edited with Randall Packard a book on development and the social sciences. Meanwhile, another track was developing, this one coming out of teaching at the University of Michigan (1982-2001) and since then at NYU. Having for many years taught courses not only on Africa, but on social theory, colonialism, and other broad topics, he began to collaborate with Jane Burbank on a graduate course that sought to counter both the national and the modern bias of most historical studies, via a study of the most durable form of political organization in world history–empires. After bringing this course to NYU, Cooper and Burbank put together a lecture course on empires for beginning undergraduates through the MAP program. Teaching this course in turn encouraged Cooper and Burbank to write a book on empires in world history, published in 2010. It won the World History Association prize for 2011 and is being translated into five languages. Cooper has continued to do extensive archival research, the fruits of which are going into the book he is currently completing on citizenship in France and French Africa, 1945-1960. He has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Wilson Center (1987), the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio (2006), the Institut d'Etudes Avancées de Nantes (2009), and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2010-11). He has also been a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His work has been supported by National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim, ACLS, and other fellowships, and his book From Slaves to Squatters won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.
Selected Works:
Books:
(Co-author with Jane Burbank) Empires in World History, Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Also in French, Spanish, Russian, German, and Turkish translations.
Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Also in French and German translations.
Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Also in French translation.
Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Also in French translation
(Co-author with Rebecca Scott and Thomas Holt) Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Also in Portuguese translation.
Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993.
On the African Waterfront: Urban Disorder and the Transformation of Work in Colonial Mombasa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
(co-author, with Allen Isaacman, Florencia Mallon, William Roseberry, and Steve Stern)From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980
Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977
Edited books:
Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa. Beverly Hills, California: Sage, 1983 (with Ann Stoler).
Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. (with Randall Packard)
International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. (with Rebecca Scott, Thomas Holt, and Aims McGuiness).
Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on the British West Indies, British Colonial Africa, South Africa, Cuba, and Brazil. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. (with Craig Calhoun and Kevin Moore).
Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power. New York: New Press, 2006)
Articles:
"Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History," American Historical Review 99 (1994): 1516-45
"'Our Strike': Equality, Anticolonial Politics, and the French West African Railway Strike of 1947-48," Journal of African History 37 (1996): 81-118. (with Rogers Brubaker)
"Beyond Identity." Theory and Society 29 (2000): 1-47. (with Jane Burbank)
"Empire, droits et citoyenneté, de 212 à 1946." Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 63, 3 (2008): 495-531.
"Possibility and Constraint: African Independence in Historical Perspective." Journal of African History, 49 (2008): 167-96.
"From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? France's Ambiguous Post-War Trajectory." Pp. 91-119 in Charles Tshimanga-Kashama, Didier Gondola, and Peter Bloom, eds., Frenchness and the Africa Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009.
"Reconstructing Empire in Post-War French and British Africa." Past and Present, 210, Supplement 6 (February 2011) on "Post-war Reconstruction in Europe," 196-210.
