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African Studies Centre: 2000-2025

William Beinart and Rebekah Lee

There has been sustained research, teaching and supervision on Africa at the University of Oxford for many years, pre-dating the formal establishment of the African Studies Centre in 2004. In many respects, the history of African Studies at Oxford is interlinked with the history of St Antony’s College. Established in 1950 and largely organised around area studies groupings, St Antony’s became an important early focus for African Studies. This was mainly through the location of the Rhodes Chair of Race Relations at the College in 1954. The name of this chair has caused confusion. It was funded by the Rhodesian Selection Trust mining company, to study race relations with specific reference to Africa. The Chair had no links with the Rhodes Trust, but the donors named it after Rhodes to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth and recognise his contribution to the southern African mining industry. The founding documents placed emphasis on studying the impact of colonialism on Africa and this was recognised by the first two appointments to the Chair, Kenneth Kirkwood (1955-1987) and Terence Ranger (1987-1997), both specialists on southern Africa. A College African Studies programme, but not a formal Centre, grew around their activities, particularly weekly research seminars on African affairs and on race relations.

When Terence Ranger took up the Chair in 1987, African Studies had a fragile and fragmented institutional identity and little space at the College. Across the broader University, there was an interfaculty committee on Africa and a Rhodes Chair committee. Some Africanists from different departments focussed their energies on Queen Elizabeth House, an umbrella for research programmes where the centre of gravity was shifting from Commonwealth to development studies. This had become an explicitly radical hub in the 1970s, with a new Africa-focussed seminar. Another institutional base for African studies developed during the early 1990s, when Paul Collier won a major Economic and Social Research Council grant to found the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE). Collier was also based at St Antony’s, which became one home for the CSAE, but he also prioritised the study of Africa through a disciplinary lens and the CSAE has remained largely based in Economics.

During Ranger’s tenure of the Chair, the Thursday evening seminar flourished as did the Visiting Fellows programme. The expansion of master’s and doctoral degrees in many social science departments, as well as in history, led to a rapid increase in the number of students who focussed on Africa and registered at St Antony’s. Ranger’s own research focussed largely on Zimbabwe, where he maintained close contacts. This created a productive academic environment. Doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers associated with Ranger, such as Jocelyn Alexander, Diana Jeater, David Maxwell, and JoAnn McGregor, went on to chairs at Oxford, Liverpool, Cambridge and Sussex. These developments helped to create significant new momentum for African Studies in the University as a whole in the 1990s, with St Antony’s an important hub.

William Beinart took up the Race Relations chair in 1997, maintaining the programme of seminars and conferences at St Antony’s, managing the African Visiting Fellows programme, and building a cohort of doctoral students, largely registered in History. Together with his doctoral students, Beinart generated something approaching an African environmental programme, drawing in colleagues across the University. It was firmly interdisciplinary in approach and developed dialogue between historians, social scientists and natural scientists. Important debates emerged between social scientists who emphasised the human costs of colonial and postcolonial environmental interventions, and scientists for whom biodiversity conservation was the main focus. By the early 2000s, this focus yielded a range of doctoral and master’s students, focussed on environmental history, medical history (including veterinary history), and indigenous knowledge.

Early into Beinart’s tenure the intellectual remit of the Chair shifted from the approach of Kirkwood and Ranger, both of whom had maintained some emphasis on the global field of race relations, to a more explicit focus on African Studies, which by this time had emerged as a rapidly developing and evolving interdisciplinary field of study. By the early 2000s, the demand for postgraduate supervision and training in African Studies was clear. For strategic and intellectual reasons the impetus grew to establish an African Studies Centre offering a master’s degree, following the example of established area studies groupings at St Antony’s. Much theory in the social sciences tended to be homogenising, prioritising Western societies and routes of social change; this flattened the distinctive trajectories of different regions. It seemed essential to combine an understanding of the asymmetries in global power relations with an understanding of what was distinctive about African states, socio-economic trajectories and cultural formations. An intensive degree focussed on Africa would allow students to immerse themselves in a linked set of issues and readings important to Africanists.

By chance, major organisational changes within the University in the early 2000s provided an opportunity to move in this direction. Four overarching divisions were created and within them the next tier were sizeable departments. The small area studies centres at St Antony’s, most serving the University as a whole, presented a dilemma: they could be incorporated into disciplinary departments but they would lose their identity and probably their staff. The centre heads lobbied for an Area Studies department and the first head of the Social Sciences Division, Donald Hay, an economist of Latin America, accepted that Oxford should protect and enhance its strength in area studies. The centres attracted excellent postgraduates and, collectively, they helped the University to sustain global coverage and expertise in the social sciences and humanities. The centres, including the African Studies Centre, were eventually incorporated in 2004 into a School of Interdisciplinary Areas Studies (SIAS), with the status of a full department. At the same time the old interfaculty committee on Africa was dissolved.

The financial resources of the Chair were used to employ David Anderson in 2003 to help set up the master’s degree – a lengthy process in Oxford. To address clear regional gaps in staffing expertise in other large disciplinary departments, the Race Relations Chair also contributed startup funds for new Africanist posts in development studies and history, filled by Raufu Mustapha and Jan-Georg Deutsch. In 2005, a St Antony’s College conference looked back to the achievements of fifty years of sustained coverage of African Studies. The conference focussed on areas of College strength such as southern African history, African politics, and issues of development. It connected former students from all generations with leading academics globally.

The MSc in African Studies was launched in 2005 and within a couple of years proved a success, attracting a large applicant pool and about 30 students per year. The master’s course has been from its inception an intensively-taught degree with lectures, frequent classes and supervision of research projects from the start of the year. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, focussing especially on history, politics and anthropology but debate- and issue-led. A highlight for students has been the more focussed Optional Papers, taught in small groups, which sometimes connect closely with students’ dissertation topics.

In the early years of the ASC, the new Social Sciences Division (and SIAS) ran a devolved funding system (no longer in place) in which the Centre was able to keep much of the master’s fee income and some doctoral fees (though all doctoral students at the time were registered in disciplinary departments). This income was invested into an additional three permanent posts, held jointly with other departments, and filled by David Pratten, Nic Cheeseman and Jonny Steinberg. With a core staff of five, and additional postdocs, African Studies could better cover history, anthropology and politics, as well as West, East and Southern Africa. The demanding post of Director of African Studies was rotated: William Beinart in 2002-6 and 2014-5; David Anderson in 2006-9; David Pratten in 2009-13; and Jonny Steinberg in 2015-2017. Colleagues in other departments supported the degree from the start with guest lectures, shared options and supervision. In turn, ASC staff contributed to their teaching and supervisory programmes. With five permanent posts, the ASC was able to generate research funds and additional temporary research and teaching posts, such as that held by Helene Neveu Kringelbach. A trawl through the Social Sciences and Humanities Departments in 2010 found about 140 doctoral theses in progress on African topics. Around this time, the five African Studies Centre post-holders were together supervising about 40 doctoral candidates. This expansion facilitated clusters with complementary interests, which brought added academic support.

The Centre was buzzing in the decade after the launch of the MSc course, 2005-2015. The Centre developed a teaching programme through which Oxford postgraduates and postdocs travelled to Fort Hare University, where they shared their knowledge and experience with students starting research degrees there. The Centre’s first separate building, an asset difficult to find in Oxford, was at 92 Woodstock Road, but it was too isolated. The ASC then moved into 13 Bevington Road, a University building across from St Antony’s, where it still stands today. A number of donations from retiring academics, including Chris Allen, Lalage Bown, James Currey and Terence Ranger, enabled the Centre to begin accumulating a sizeable library collection, now numbering over 10,000 books. St Antony’s College remained the major site for teaching and events, but St Cross and other Colleges increasingly became an additional focus.  

A number of regular events took shape in this period:

It was, almost literally, possible to attend a research seminar, visiting speaker or discussion group on an African topic every day.

The Centre was also generating sufficient funds to sponsor a number of conferences and workshops every year. For example, in 2006-7:

2014 was another standout year:

Throughout this first decade, staff at the African Studies Centre generated new research projects, won funding that brought in postdoctoral researchers and produced important books – David Anderson focussed on politics and the environment in Kenya and southern Ethiopia; William Beinart on the environmental history of the British empire, on prickly pear and African veterinary knowledge in the Eastern Cape; Nic Cheeseman on democracy in Africa, and comparative research on presidentialism in Russia, Latin American and Africa; David Pratten pursued research on youth and on masquerades in Nigeria; and Jonny Steinberg wrote books on the Liberian diaspora in New York and on Somali migrancy in South Africa. Although research interests were diverse, they came together in comparative teaching on the MSc course, in assisting and examining one another’s doctoral students and in a shared commitment to interdisciplinary work. Colleagues shared a concern that the teaching and research should be grounded in African countries and should reflect perspectives drawn from those experiences. Appointments were in some senses serendipitous because the Centre had to generate the partnerships with other Departments for joint appointments. History, Politics and Anthropology shared an interest in expanding African coverage and recognised that specialists on Africa attracted diverse and talented postgraduates. The number of African Studies specialists in all three of these departments, as well as Development Studies, increased in these years, reflecting that the Centre’s growth also facilitated expansion of teaching and research on Africa throughout the university.    

Having achieved considerable momentum, African Studies went through a period of transition from 2015 and it proved more difficult to grow. In 2013 Miles Larmer, a social and political historian of southern and central Africa, succeeded David Anderson, and in 2015 William Beinart retired from the Chair. After some delay Wale Adebanwi was elected as the new Rhodes Professor of Race Relations in 2017, the same year that Miles Tendi, an expert in militarism, gender and politics in southern and west Africa, joined the Centre on a joint appointment with the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) – both were the first African appointments to permanent posts at the Centre. Adebanwi, Larmer and Tendi’s respective research agendas helped establish the Centre as an important hub of innovative, interdisciplinary research on African politics, nationalism, and security, distinguished by a fine-grained methodological attentiveness to historical and ethnographic traditions. In particular, biography became an important analytic vehicle, building on Jonny Steinberg’s substantive oeuvre in this area, and helped mark emergent studies of contemporary African politics from scholars in the Centre.

Adebanwi was the Centre’s Director from 2017-19. As Chair, Adebanwi established for the first time an International Advisory Board (IAB) for the Centre, inaugurated in 2018 and chaired by Tito Mboweni, who was appointed Finance Minister by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. The IAB brought together prominent public and academic figures including former Namibian First Lady and lawyer, Monica Geingos, former United Nations Under-Secretary of Political Affairs and Nigeria’s former External Affairs Minister, Zambian social development expert and former First Lady, Dr Charlotte Harland-Scott, and Professor Ibrahim Gambari, who succeeded Mboweni in 2019 as the chair of the IAB. One of the primary achievements of the IAB was to facilitate funding for scholarships for African students and for student hardship. During his membership of the IAB, Ghanaian businessman Thomas Svanikier made a major donation to the University for a hardship fund for African students in any discipline. These efforts to address the need for financial assistance to African students facing unexpected hardship during their studies were further boosted by a subsequent major donation in 2023 by MSc alumnus Florence ‘Cuppy’ Otedola to the Africa Oxford (AfOx) Initiative at the University.

In 2018, the Centre began a partnership with AfOx to establish a Visiting Fellowship scheme based in African Studies, enabling an African scholar to spend time away from their usual teaching and other obligations to engage in research collaborations and mentoring opportunities with Oxford-based scholars. The annual AfOx-African Studies Visiting Fellowship, which continues to run to this day, has resulted in invaluable networks forged with scholars based in African institutions, including the following former Fellows: Nkululeko Sibanda (Rhodes University, South Africa); Abosede Babatunde (University of Ilorin, Nigeria); Senayon Olaoluwa (University of Ibadan, Nigeria).

Adebanwi’s tenure as Chair also saw a concerted, direct engagement of the Centre with African leaders. The Centre hosted or co-hosted (with St Antony’s College, Said Business School, AfOx, and Brasenose College) eight African leaders, who visited Oxford and gave public lectures. This included five sitting presidents, two immediate past heads of state, and one vice-president: Presidents of Gabon (Ali Bongo Ondimba), Ghana (Nana Akufo-Addo), Botswana (Mokgweetsi Masisi), Sierra Leone (Julius Bio), and Seychelles (Danny Faure); former Presidents of Mauritius (Ameena Gurib-Fakim) and of Ghana (John Mahama); then-Vice President of Nigeria (Yemi Osinbajo).

Adebanwi’s leadership witnessed a renewed effort, from 2019, to rename the Rhodes Chair he occupied. This built on previous efforts by Beinart, starting as early as 2010, to dissociate Rhodes’ name from the Chair and fix the post securely within the African Studies Centre. The global Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movement coalesced in Oxford in 2015, leading to calls to decolonise the University and remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College’s façade. The RMF movement in Oxford involved a number of African Studies students, alumni and associated staff, and accelerated the impetus for renaming the Chair. The Social Sciences Division approved the name change in 2021, with Congregation later assenting. However, the decision had to be approved by the King’s Privy Council under the 1923 Universities of Oxford and Cambridge Act, and this took a further unforeseen extended period. Whilst the post remained vacant from 2021 when Adebanwi left the Centre, the Privy Council’s approval for the name change was finally obtained in 2024 and the Chair has since formally become known as the Professorship of African Studies.

David Pratten again became Director (2019-21) and steered the Centre through the difficult COVID years, when the University had to operate virtually. Miles Larmer won a major European Research Council grant to research the social history of the mining towns of the Central African Copperbelt in the DRC and Zambia, which generated, alongside a team of postdoctoral research associates, a number of events, conferences, publications and books. Between 2016 and 2021, the Centre hosted postdoctoral researchers who not only taught on the MSc course but also contributed to the intellectual climate in the Centre before they moved on to excellent careers elsewhere, including: Thomas Hendricks, Julia Viebach, Liz Fouksman, Tim Livsey, and Olly Owen.

The early 2020s marked a period of further transition, and renewal, for the Centre. From 2021, doctoral students supervised by Centre staff began to flow through from the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA) (rather than through traditional disciplinary departments, as had been the case in the past) after the School established a DPhil in Global and Area Studies in 2021. Miles Larmer became Director of the Centre from 2021 until his departure in 2023. In 2021-22, Doris Okenwa, a scholar of extractives and development anthropology with regional expertise in east Africa, joined the Centre as the Evans Pritchard Fellow in African Anthropology, as the Fellow role became a fulltime post in the ASC/OSGA following the departure of David Pratten to the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME); and Rebekah Lee, a historian and ethnographer of modern South Africa specialising in gender, urbanisation, migration and health, became the first female permanent postholder at the Centre, succeeding Jonny Steinberg as Associate Professor in African Studies. The ever-exacting post of Centre Director was taken up by Miles Tendi in 2023-24, followed by Rebekah Lee in 2024-25, the same year the Centre welcomed Michael Odijie, a historian of labour and slavery and the politics of development in West Africa, who began his tenure as Associate Professor in African History. Peter Brooke, historian of mass media and colonialism in central and West Africa, was Course Director for the MSc in African Studies from 2021-2025 and provided valuable stability and stewardship of the course and its students throughout this period of fluctuation in the Centre’s staff.

The Centre continued to host important international events and conferences, bringing together important scholars and practitioners in the field. Some events of note were:

As we close this look back on a quarter-century of the African Studies Centre’s history, we can reflect on some trajectories of achievement. The 2025-26 academic year marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the MSc in African Studies. Over these two decades, well over 500 students have completed the course, and many of our alumni have become prominent innovators and leaders in a wide variety of sectors, including academia, governance, policy, development, NGOs, business and industry, and the creative arts. Moreover, we can also positively reflect on the changing demographics of our MSc students – by 2023, roughly 60%-65% of the MSc cohort were of African origin, representing a marked change from the early years of the course when it attracted students largely from North American and European backgrounds. This transformative shift was made possible in part through sustained efforts over a long period to fundraise for scholarships to support African students.

Yet, as a Centre we realise that we need to continue to strive to remain relevant and responsive to the wider socio-economic and political forces that continue to shape the study of, and production of knowledge on and from, Africa. We look forward to witnessing how our newest colleagues will shape the Centre’s next chapter: Gabrielle Robbins, an anthropologist researching health and livelihoods in Madagascar and the broader East African/western Indian Ocean, has recently joined the Centre as the next Evans Pritchard Fellow; and Rita Abrahamsen, an internationally renowned scholar of African politics and international relations, has been appointed to the Professorship of African Studies and will take up the Chair in January 2026.

Contact us

alumni.office@sant.ox.ac.uk