Department of History

Meredith McKittrick’s regional specialization is Southern Africa. She is the author of To Dwell Secure: Generation, Christianity and Colonialism in Ovamboland (Heinemann 2002) and is currently working on a book manuscript on the history of rivers and riparian communities in Southern Africa. She has also published several book chapters and articles on subjects including rainmaking and political power, masculinity in colonial Africa, political violence in 19th-century southwestern Africa, and gender relations during a colonial-era famine in Namibia.

Her 1999 “Journal of African History”article on a murder case in colonial Namibia won the Robert F. Heizer prize for the best article in ethnohistory. In 2004-05, Professor McKittrick was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. This summer she conducted research on the Kavango River in Botswana and Namibia, and this fall she has a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor McKittrick teaches the two-semester survey of sub-Saharan Africa as well as History of Southern Africa, Comparative History of the U.S. and South Africa, Gender and Generation in Africa, and Resistance and Rebellion in Africa. She also plans to introduce courses in African environmental history and post-independence African history in the near future.