Thank you for visiting my website. I am a junior research fellow (postdoc) in politics at the University of Oxford’s New College and a recent PhD graduate of Georgetown University’s Department of Government. My research examines the development of Kenyan and Tanzanian language policies and their influence on how Kenyans and Tanzanians understand and identify with their nations. Please scroll down or click on the following links to visit my teaching, dissertation research, other research, and CV pages to learn more about my work.
Teaching
At New College, I teach tutorials and review classes for the first-year Practice of Politics (introductory comparative politics) course and the second-year Comparative Government and Political Sociology core courses and tutorials for the third-year Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa elective course. I also teach Politics in Sub-Saharan Africa classes for the University of Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR). I am committed to excellence in teaching and continually working to improve my teaching skills.
At Georgetown University, I worked as a teaching assistant for four semesters (fall 2016 – spring 2018) and led discussion sections for the large, introductory lecture courses in comparative politics and international relations. I was nominated for the Graduate School’s Outstanding TA in the Social Sciences award in 2017 and participated in the on-campus Center for New Designs in Research and Learning Teaching’s Apprenticeship in Teaching Program.
I previously taught English to Form I (8th grade) and Form II (9th grade) students at Majengo Secondary School (2011-12) in Moshi, Tanzania.
Language Policy and the Nation in East Africa
My dissertation examines the development of Kenyan and Tanzanian language policies – the regulations governing the use of different languages – in the educational system and legislative debates and their influence on how Kenyans and Tanzanians understand and identify with their nations. In 2019, I carried out qualitative research for 11 months in Kenya and Tanzania, including semi-structured interviews with more than 160 Kenyans and Tanzanians, ethnographic observation, and archival research in Kenya National Archives, the Tanzania National Archives, and other collections.
I am grateful to the U.S. Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the Georgetown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Georgetown University Department of Government, the African Studies Association, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Cosmos Club Foundation for their support of my dissertation research.
Ongoing Research
I have presented my in-progress research at major research conferences including the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, African Studies Association, African Studies Association of Africa, International Political Science Association, International Studies Association, Midwest Political Science Association, and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
Languages of National Politics in Kenya and Tanzania
To complement my qualitative research into political campaigns’ language use, I adapted prior studies to design a 1,400-respondent multilingual survey along the Kenyan-Tanzanian border where I had previously been based for part of my dissertation fieldwork. With external funding, including an APSA-awarded NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, I fielded a survey experiment testing whether and how potential voters’ views of a politician after hearing a brief political message vary by language treatment (Kiswahili or their first language) and whether that variation is consistent between Kenyan and Tanzanian respondents. I am analyzing the data and will present my results at the 2023 APSA annual meeting.
Bible Translation and the Politics of National Cohesion
While conducting dissertation research, I learned that the Kenya and Tanzania Bible Societies would complete the first-ever full translation of the Bible into the Igikuria language, associated with the Abakuria people concentrated along the Kenya-Tanzania border, in 2020. In the working paper “Bible Translation and the Politics of National Cohesion,” I investigate how the politics of contemporary indigenously directed translation efforts differ from those of the colonial missionary translation work and how the differing Kenyan and Tanzanian language policies interact with the Igikuria Bible’s potential political implications.
Fragments of Kenya’s 1970s Kiswahilization Campaign
Kenya’s formal language policies and patterns of language use in society privilege English to a greater extent than those of Tanzania, which favor Kiswahili. In this working paper, I study the intermittent efforts by President Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya African National Union (KANU) Acting Secretary-General Robert Matano, and their allies to promote Kiswahili in Kenya until Kenyatta’s 1978 death. The flagship policy of the Kiswahili campaign, a Kiswahili-only parliamentary debate rule more stringent than anything adopted in Tanzania, was in effect for less than five years (1974-79), and relatively few traces of the Kiswahili campaign exist in contemporary Kenyan language policy and public memory beyond the infrequent use of Kiswahili in Parliament and Kiswahili’s ambiguous “national language” status. Drawing on archival sources in the Kenya National Archives, McMillan Memorial Library, the Nation Media Group’s archives, and the British National Archives, supplemented by current media reports, I trace how contemporary Kenyan language policies did not evolve as straightforwardly from the colonial era as a first glance might suggest and consider how greater understanding of the earlier unsuccessful Kiswahili promotion campaign can inform renewed efforts to promote the national and now co-official language as a source of national unity in the aftermath of the 2007-08 ethnicized post-election violence.
Not All Dominoes are Created Equal: Analogical Reasoning and the U.S. Response to the Zanzibar Revolution
My research interests extend beyond the politics of language(s) policy to the related language of politics. My working paper “Not All Dominoes are Created Equal: Analogical Reasoning and the U.S. Response to the Zanzibar Revolution” is a close, archival study of how U.S. diplomats and analysts used the analogy of Zanzibar as an “African Cuba” and the metaphorical logic of the domino theory in making sense of the unexpected 1964 Zanzibar Revolution. The Lyndon B. Johnson Foundation funded my archival research at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.
