Participant Info

First Name
Ismay
Last Name
Milford
Country
Germany
State
Affiliation
Universität Leipzig
Website URL
https://www.gkr.uni-leipzig.de/personenprofil/mitarbeiter/dr-ismay-milford
Keywords
Decolonization, Cold War, East Africa, Central African Federation, information and communication, international organisations, internationalism, youth, students, transnational networks, solidarity networks, Afro-Asian movement, non-alignment, anti-colonial activism, pamphlets, radio, information, librarians, resources, environment, satellites
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a historian of knowledge, technology and the environment, focusing on twentieth-century East Africa.

I joined Leipzig University in September 2025 to lead an Emmy Noether Research Group on technologies of environmental knowledge production in Africa. I will recruit doctoral and postdoctoral team members in 2027.

My previous research and publications have spanned topics including religion, activism, regionalism, print, radio, and student politics, mainly in East and Central Africa, from a global historical perspective

My first monograph, African Activists in a Decolonising World: The Making of an Anticolonial Culture, 1952-1966, based on my PhD thesis (EUI, 2019) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. I have been interviewed about the book for Africa Is A Country and the New Books Network.

From 2019 to 2022 I was part of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s’. One of the project’s outputs is the co-produced Open Access online teaching resource called ‘East Africa’s Global Lives’.

From 2023 to 2025 I held a Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at Freie Universität Berlin, where I carried out a project on the information society and the New World Information and Communication Order in independent East Africa.

Recent Publications

African activists in a decolonising world: The making of an anticolonial culture, 1952-1966 (Cambridge University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009277020.

Beyond Federation: Ideas and Practices of East African Regionalism in a National and Global Age, 1950–1975 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025), co-authored with Emma Hunter, Daniel Brnach and Gerard McCann, Open Access https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111620060

Twenty-Five Years of St Augustine University of Tanzania: Building the City of God (Peramiho Press, 2024), co-edited with Eginald P. Mihanjo, Gaudence Talemwa, Elizabeth K. Sebastian, and Osmund Kapinga. Open Access https://doi.org/10.17169/refubium-47953.

Environment, Technology, and Development (De Gruyter, 2025), co-edited with Corinna Unger and Iris Borowy, Forthcoming, Open Access https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111611358

‘Communication Theology, the Decolonization of Information, and the Africanization of Journalism, 1960–1990’, Modern Intellectual History (forthcoming 2025).

‘Working for the Wireless World: Radio Uganda Technicians and the Wo/Manpower of 1970s Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Global History (2023) https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022823000207.

‘Journalism training in 1960s East Africa, or the transferability of a stapler’, in Damiano Matasci and Raphaëlle Ruppen Coutaz (eds.) Educational Internationalisms in the Global Cold War (Routledge Cold War History series, 2024) Open Access http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003247814-18

‘The man behind “Uganda Renaissance”‘, Africa Is A Country (2023), https://africasacountry.com/2023/11/the-man-behind-uganda-renaissance

‘Roundtable: The archives of global history in a time of international immobility’, Historical Research (2022), co-edited with Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, https://doi.org/10.1093/hisres/htac015

‘A New World in the Swiss Alps: Moral Re-Armament, Religious Internationalism and African Decolonisation’, Cultural and Social History (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2022.2106613

‘Just an African radical? A Zambian at the edge of the Third World’, in Laura Almagor, Haakon Ikonomou and Gunvor Simonsen (eds.), Global biographies: Lived history as method (MUP, 2022), https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526161161/

‘Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, Journal of African History (2021), co-authored with Daniel Branch, Emma Hunter and Gerard McCann, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853721000566

‘African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s’, Journal of Contemporary History (2021), co-authored with Gerard McCann, https://doi.org/10.1177/00220094211011536

Federation, Partnership, and the chronologies of space in 1950s East and Central Africa’, The Historical Journal (2020).

‘More than a Cold War scholarship: East-Central African anticolonial activists, the International Union of Socialist Youth, and the evasion of the colonial state (1955-65)’, Stichproben: The Vienna Journal of African Studies, No. 34 (2018).

‘Zoom in, zoom out, change lens: New directions in the historiography of decolonisation’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2017).

‘”Shining vistas” and false passports: recipes for an anti-colonial hub‘, Afro-Asian Visions, online (2017).

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia
Expertise by Geography
Africa
Expertise by Chronology
20th century
Expertise by Topic
Children & Youth, Colonialism, Environment, Government, Higher Ed, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Local & Regional, Politics, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Science, Technology