Participant Info

First Name
Ismay
Last Name
Milford
Country
Germany
State
Affiliation
Freie Universität Berlin
Website URL
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5761-2348
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 East and Central Africa’s global connections across the period of decolonisation and am currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Freie Universität, Berlin.

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.

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’.

My current work relates to the intersection of information, technology and the environment in 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.

‘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, 2023) forthcoming.

‘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
Capitalism, Children & Youth, Colonialism, Government, Higher Ed, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Politics, Race, Rebellion & Revolution