Rhiannon Stephens
· ProfessorVerifiedColumbia University · History
Active 2000–2025
About
Rhiannon Stephens is a professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, specializing in the history of precolonial and early colonial East Africa from the first millennium CE through the twentieth century. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Northwestern University (2007), an M.A. in Climate & Society from Columbia University (2021), an M.A. in History from Northwestern University (2002), and a B.A. Hons. in Swahili & History from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (2000). Her scholarly work includes the authoring of 'Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History' (Duke University Press, 2022), which explores how people in eastern Uganda have historically understood and managed wealth and poverty over two thousand years. Her first monograph, 'A History of African Motherhood: The Case of Uganda, 700-1900' (Cambridge University Press, 2013), examines the social and ideological dimensions of motherhood across a millennium of Ugandan history. She is also the co-editor of 'Doing Conceptual History in Africa' (Berghahn Books, 2018), which critically engages with the methodology of conceptual history on the continent. Her current research focuses on questions of gender, power, and climate over fifteen-hundred years on the east coast of Africa. Since joining Columbia in 2011, she has contributed to the academic community through various leadership roles, including chairing the Junior Faculty Advisory Board and the Policy and Planning Committee, and has been recognized for her teaching excellence with the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award in 2019-20. She trains students in interdisciplinary methods for deep African history, modern East African history, and African gender history, and her work has been published in prominent journals such as the American Historical Review and the Journal of African History.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Development economics
- Economics
- History
- Economic growth
- Law
- Geography
- Archaeology
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Socioeconomics
Selected publications
The Power of Motherhood and Wealth:
Universitaire Pers Leuven eBooks · 2025-05-15
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingConceptual History in Precolonial Contexts: A View from East Africa
History of Humanities · 2024-03-01
article1st authorCorrespondingConceptual history offers a method for writing the intellectual history of African societies that did not leave a documentary record accessible in archives. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, in this case drawing on the methods of comparative historical linguistics, it is possible to rethink the limitations of the traditional archive and privilege the intellectual work of people even when their names and the details of their individual lives have been lost to us. Through the case study of the concept of wealth in eastern Uganda over the past 2,000 years, the complexity and dynamism of people’s economic ideas becomes apparent. Also apparent is the longevity of their engagement with these concepts over at least the past two millennia. Scholars working in other contexts, including modern ones, can draw on these comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to move beyond the limitations of the archive.
African Studies Review · 2024-05-08
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingHolly Elisabeth Hanson. To Speak and Be Heard: Seeking Good Government in Uganda, ca. 1500–2015. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. xiv + 253 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $34.95. Paper. ISBN: 9780821424919.
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa
Duke University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
In Poverty and Wealth in East Africa Rhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual 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. This history serves as a powerful reminder that colonialism and capitalism did not introduce economic thought to this region and demonstrates that even in contexts of relative material equality between households, people invested intellectual energy in creating new ways to talk about the poor and the rich. Stephens uses an interdisciplinary approach to write this history for societies without written records before the nineteenth century. She reconstructs the words people spoke in different eras using the methods of comparative historical linguistics, overlaid with evidence from archaeology, climate science, oral traditions, and ethnography. Demonstrating the dynamism of people’s thinking about poverty and wealth in East Africa long before colonial conquest, Stephens challenges much of the received wisdom about the nature and existence of economic and social inequality in the region’s deeper past.
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa
2022-12-31
bookOpen access1st authorCorrespondingChapter six Wealth, Poverty, and the Colonial Economy: Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
2022-12-02
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPoverty and Wealth in East Africa
Duke University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Development economics
- Geography
- Economics
Poverty and Wealth in East Africa
2022-10-24
bookOpen access1st authorCorrespondingRhiannon Stephens offers a conceptual 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.
2022-12-02
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2022-12-02
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 4 shared
Dafydd Stephens
- 3 shared
Axel Fleisch
- 1 shared
Amelie von Eisenhart-Rothe
Education
- 2007
Ph.D., History
Northwestern University
M.A., Climate & Society
Northwestern University
Awards & honors
- Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award (2019-20)
- Provost’s Grant to Mid-Career Faculty (2022)
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship (2020-…
- The Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton Universit…
- Heyman Center Fellowship, The Society of Fellows in the Huma…
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