Awards

Titled Professor - 2018 - 2022

Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor

About Michelle Renee Moyd

Professor Moyd is a historian of eastern Africa, with special interests in the region's history of soldiering and warfare. Her first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa explores the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa, today's Tanzania. The book examines how askari identities were shaped by their geographical and sociological origins, their ways of war, and their roles as agents of the colonial state. She is currently working on a short book entitled Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which will examine the spectrum of African experiences in the war, especially as soldiers and workers. Another research project in its very early stages, examines colonial militaries and labor patterns across different imperial experiences. She is particularly interested in bringing the experience of nineteenth-century African-American soldiers into a broader analysis of soldiers of empire. She is also researching the social, cultural, and international political history of the 1979 Kagera War fought between Tanzania and Uganda for a future book-length project.

Her teaching draws on overlapping interests in African history; histories of conflict, militarization, and humanitarianism; the global history of World War I and its aftermaths; and labor history. She developed the course "Histories of Humanitarianism," which will be taught at both undergraduate and graduate levels.