Frederick Cooper's Teaching and Research InterestsResearch Interests:
Over the past 15 years, my research has moved from the study of labor in East Africa to a broader examination of processes of colonization and decolonization. My earliest work was on slavery on the east coast of Africa , followed by studies of slave emancipation and agricultural labor in the early colonial era and of dock workers in the late colonial period. All these studies tried to balance analysis of the particular dynamics of African societies with attention to Africa 's connections beyond the continent. More recently, I have been working on historical and theoretical issues in the study of colonial societies, in Africa and elsewhere, and I have recently completed a book being published by University of California Press that is a collection of essays entitled Colonialism in Question. I am now pursuing two broad lines of inquiry, one on the last fifty years of African history, focusing on the openings and closures of the decolonization process, the second on a comparative and interactive study of empires. In both regards, I wish to get beyond the excessive focus on the nation-state in the scholarship of recent years toward a fuller analysis of the range of ways in which people imagined collective futures and the range of institutional mechanisms which constrained and stimulated the fulfillment of those possibilities. Empire-building and anti-imperial mobilization both made supranational entities into units of moral discourse and political mobilization. I am planning further research on the citizenship construct at the end of empire, specifically how "imperial citizenship" --the assertion of rights and claims to equality within French and British empires-- became a focus of mobilization and struggle in the decade after World War II but rapidly gave way to a series of national citizenships at the moment of independence, a change which affected both former colonies and former colonizing powers.
Teaching Interests:
My teaching reflects the evolution of my interests over the course of my career. I remain committed to teaching basic and advanced courses in African history, while my focus has been moving forward in time, up to the present era. Along with Jane Burbank, I am teaching a course on "Empires, States, and Political Imagination," and I expect that this and related cross-regional topics will remain part of my teaching repertoire. I have taught courses on post-emancipation societies in comparative perspective, on capitalist development, on democratization in different parts of the world, as well as a variety of courses on Africa.
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