Participant Info

First Name
Michelle
Last Name
Moyd
Country
United States
State
IN Indiana
Affiliation
Indiana University, Bloomington
Website URL
https://history.indiana.edu/faculty_staff/faculty/moyd_michelle.html
Keywords
Africa, East Africa, military, warfare, soldiers, World War I, German colonialism in Africa, humanitarianism
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a historian of eastern Africa, with special interests in the region’s history of soldiering and warfare. My first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa explores the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa, today’s Tanzania. The book examines how askari identities were shaped by their geographical and sociological origins, their ways of war, and their roles as agents of the colonial state.

I am currently at work on a short book entitled Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which will examine the spectrum of African experiences in the war, especially as soldiers and workers. Another research project, which is in very early stages, examines  colonial militaries and labor patterns across different imperial experiences. I am particularly interested in bringing the experience of nineteenth-century African-American soldiers into a broader analysis of soldiers of empire.

Recent Publications
  • With Yuliya Komska and David Gramling, Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave, 2018), forthcoming
  • With Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, “Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness: Responses to Children’s Militarization in Uganda and the U.S.,” in Micol Seigel, ed., Panic, Transnational Cultural Studies, and the Affective Contours of Power (Routledge, 2018), forthcoming
  • “Color Lines, Front Lines: The First World War from the South,” Radical History Review, 131 (May 2018), forthcoming
  • Violent Intermediaries:  African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2014).
  • “Gender and Violence” in Susan Grayzel and Tammy Proctor, eds. Gender and the Great War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 187-210.
  • “Resistance and Rebellions (Africa),” in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2017-06-20. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.11112.
  • “Centring a Sideshow: local experiences of the First World War in Africa,” First World War Studies, 7, 2 (2016), 111-130.
  • “The Tyranny of Distance, Up Close,” Africa is a Country blog, October 29, 2015.
  • “Extra-European Theatres of War,” 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10318.
Media Coverage
Country Focus
Tanzania
Expertise by Geography
Africa, Germany
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, 20th century
Expertise by Topic
Colonialism, Gender, Genocide, Government, Military, Race, World War I