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-administered and NSF-funded 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 have presented research related to this study at the 2023 APSA and 2025 MPSA annual meeting. With the support of the Baylor University Research Committee and my department, I am working with the Georgetown University Initiative on Innovation, Development and Evaluation (gui2de) to transcribe and translate participant responses to the survey’s two open-ended questions for textual analysis to inform my interpretation of the survey’s quantitative results.
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.
