BIEA DIRECTORS

David Anderson 2009-present

David Anderson will fill the position of Acting Director at the BIEA from 1 October 2009 until the end of September 2010.   He is taking on his BIEA role during a period of study leave from the University of Oxford, where he is Professor of African Politics, Director of the African Studies Centre, and a Fellow of St Cross College. 

Professor Anderson’s long-standing interest in the history and politics of eastern Africa is reflected in a range of current research projects. His work on the transnational political economy of khat (miraa), The Khat Controversy, was published in May 2007.  He continues to work on the issue of khat consumption and marketing, and has recently completed a report on the social harms of khat for the UK government.  He has also written a number of articles, to be published over the coming year, on the history of khat prohibitions. 

Anderson continues to research and write on the theme of state violence and its consequences, and has recently completed a book examining Kenya’s post-electoral crisis of 2008.   Uncivil Society: Violence and Politics in Kenya will be published in 2010.  He also plans a collection of essays for 2010, taking up some of the still controversial themes surrounding the history of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion, about which he has written in Histories of the Hanged (2005). 

Anderson also participates in a number of collaborations with other Africanist scholars based at Oxford. With Dr David Turton, Dr Marco Bassi, and Dr Graciela Gil-Romera he is engaged in a research project on the history of environmental change in the Lower Omo Valley of southern Ethiopia. This project, funded through the AHRC ‘Environment & Landscape’ Programme, takes up themes Anderson first explored in his 2002 book, Eroding the Commons.  A monograph from this research, to be co-authored with David Turton, will be published in 2011. Anderson is an Editor of the BIEA-sponsored Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Professor Anderson is a very active graduate teacher and supervisor of doctoral students. Most of these students are drawn from the disciplines of Politics and History, but others are based in Anthropology or Development Studies. Over the past three years his students have undertaken research in a wide range of African countries, including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Sudan, Zambia, Malawi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and South Africa, often working on themes relating to violence, conflict and post-conflict reconstruction.

Justin Willis, 2006-2009

Justin Willis was seconded to the position of Director from the University of Durham, in the United Kingdom, where he is Reader in History. Justin has a long involvement with BIEA, having been a graduate attachee in 1986, and Assistant Director from 1989 to 1997.

Justin has a long-standing interest in the history and culture of the Kenya coast, and particularly of the Mijikenda; his first book (Mombasa, the Swahili and the Making of the Mijikenda (Oxford, 1993)) was an examination of labour migration and ethnicity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has also worked on ethnicity in north-eastern Tanzania and pastoralist-agriculturalist relations in south-western Uganda. From 1997 to 2000 he undertook ESRC-funded research on the social history of alcohol in East Africa (published as Potent Brews (Nairobi and Oxford, 2002)). From 2001-2006 Justin's teaching and research focussed on the modern history of Sudan, and particularly on the nature of governmental authority there. While at BIEA Dr Willis conducted a number of research projects, most notably a cultural history of elections in eastern Africa.

Paul Lane, 1998 - 2006

Paul Lane joined the Institute shortly after completing a period of teaching Archaeology and Museum Studies at the University of Botswana in Gaborone, and before that at the University of Dar es Salaam. At both institutions he was instrumental in helping establish and consolidate degree programmes in Archaeology.

His main research interests encompass the historical and maritime archaeology of eastern and southern Africa, and the transition to farming in these same regions. While Director of the Institute, he carried out his own research on the transition from hunting and gathering to farming in northern Nyanza Province, Kenya and on the historical archaeology of Luo settlement in the same area. He also collaborated with Dr Bertram Mapunda (Archaeology Unit, University of Dar es Salaam), on the causes and origins of soil erosion in the Kondoa District of north-central Tanzania, and worked with Dr Kennedy Mutundu (Kenyatta University), Dr Robert Payton (University of Newcastle), Professor David Taylor (Trinity College Dublin), Dr Carolyn Thorp (Witwatersrand University) and Dr Benjamin Smith and colleagues (Rock Art Research Institute, Witwatersrand University) on an interdisciplinary study of Landscape and Environmental Change in Semi-Arid Landscapes of East & Southern Africa, with particular reference to the Laikipia Plateau. He finished his contract with the Institute at the end of September 2006, after eight years as Director. He now runs a Marie Curie research group, funded by the European Union, on the Historical Ecology of East African Landscapes based at the Department of Archaeology, University of York in the UK.

John Sutton, 1983-1998

As a research student attached to the Institute in its early years, John Sutton worked on the Iron Age archaeology and history of East Africa under Merrick Posnansky, and published his revised doctoral thesis on the archaeology of the Western Highlands of Kenya in the Institute’s Memoirs series. He subsequently held teaching and research positions at the University of Dar es Salaam and at universities in West Africa, maintaining an active interest in the East African Iron Age and in agricultural history and archaeology. As Director of the Institute, he initiated new research on the remains of irrigation systems of former agricultural communities, notably at Engaruka in the Rift Valley of northern Tanzania and Nyanga in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. While in post, he also helped establish a programme of archaeological investigation of the emergence of complex societies in the interlacustrine region of East Africa, of which his excavations at Ntusi in Western Uganda (later in collaboration with Andrew Reid) formed an integral part. Among other activities during his tenure of the Directorship, he oversaw the Institute’s move from Chiromo Mansion to its current premises in Kileleshwa, and began a more active programme of popularising the work of the Institute - of which his overview published as A Thousand Years of East Africa, has played an integral part.

Neville Chittick, 1961-1983

Neville Chittick was appointed the first Director of the Institute in 1961, a year after the Institute had been formally inaugurated. Immediately prior to this he had been the first Conservator of Antiquities in what was then Tanganyika. His principal research interest was the pre-Portuguese coastal archaeology of eastern Africa, and particularly the influence of Islam and maritime trade on the formation of Swahili identities. He conducted extensive excavations at the southern Swahili town of Kilwa, with its celebrated architectural remains, the results of which were published as a two volume report in the Institute’s Memoirs series. His work at Kilwa and related sites on the southern coast and islands continued till the mid-1960s, after which he turned his attention to Manda, an early northern Swahili town located in the Lamu archipelago in northern Kenya, and various sections of the Somali coast, including the important 1^st century BC to 5^th century AD sites at Ras Hafun. Between 1972-74, he directed excavations at Aksum in northern Ethiopia, focussing in particular on the residential and burial areas associated with the elite. Unfortunately, the 1974 Revolution in Ethiopia and subsequent events curtailed further work at Aksum for the next two decades. The results of Chittick’s research were nevertheless written up and published posthumously by Stuart Munro-Hay in the Institute’s Memoirs series.