Professor Felicitas Becker
Professor Becker is a historian of modern East African history. She obtained her PhD from Cambridge University in 2003 after an MA at SOAS and undergraduate studies at Humboldt University, Berlin, and she has taught at SOAS, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, and Cambridge University before moving to Gent in 2016.
In recent years, she has been PI of the ERC-funded research project 'the aftermaths of slavery in East Africa'.
My work has focused on the spread of Islam, poverty and development, and the aftermath of slavery. These topics are less disparate than they seem; many former slaves converted to Islam, and both Islam and development were prisms through which to approach the question of how to build good lives from difficult beginnings. I enjoy using oral sources because I enjoy using Swahili and being in Tanzania, a country whose people have easily taught me as much as I could ever teach them.
'Oaths, slave agency, and the abolition of slavery in Western Tanzania', Law and History Review 2024
'Populist Islamism in East Africa: elaborating alternative futures from idealized pasts', in Bevernage, Mestdagh, Ramalho and Verbergt, Claiming the People's Past, CUP 2024
The politics of poverty: policy making and rural development in Tanzania. Cambridge: CUP 2019.
‘Researching the aftermath of slavery in mainland East Africa: methodological, ethical and practical challenges.’ Slavery and Abolition 43 (2022) (with Salvatory Nyanto, James Giblin, Ann McDougall, Alexander Meckelburg and Lotte Pelckmans).
‘Looking for life: traces of slavery in the structures and social lives of southern Swahili towns.’ Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10 (2021), 87-109.
‘Locating the ‘customary’ in post-colonial Tanzania’s politics: the shifting modus operandi of the rural state’. Journal of Eastern African Studies 14 (2020), 1-19.
‘Poverty in Africa’. In Bent Greve (ed), The Routledge Handbook of Poverty. London: Routledge, 2019, 203-216 (with Ewout Frankema).
‘Patriarchal masculinity in recent Swahili-language Muslim sermons’. Journal of Religion in Africa, special issue on masculinities, 46 (2016), 158-186.
‘Fading slave regimes and the reconstruction of patriarchal authority according to oral sources: Mingoyo, Southern Tanzania’. In Alice Bellagamba, Sandra Greene and Martin Klein (eds), African slaves, African masters: politics, memories, social life. Toronto: Africa World Press, 2017, 127-152
‘Obscuring and revealing: Tanzanian Muslim engagement with volunteering and the aid sector’. African Studies Review, special section on volunteering, 58 (2015), 111-33.
'The bureaucratic performance of development in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania'. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 35 (2014), 61-76.
‘Common themes, individual voices: memories of slavery around a former slave plantation in Mingoyo, Tanzania’. In Alice Bellagamba, Carolyn Brown and Martin Klein, African voices on slavery and the slave trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 71-87.
‘'Remembering Nyerere: political rhetoric and dissent in contemporary Tanzania'. African Affairs 112 (2013), 1-24.
‘Religious anxieties in two marginal regions: reformist debates on funerary ritual among Tanzanian and Acehnese Muslims in the twentieth century’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33 (2013), 102-116.
‘Commoners in the process of gradual Islamization: reexamining their role in the light of evidence from Southeast Tanzania.’ Journal of Global History 3 (2008), 227-49.
‘Rural Islamism during the “war on terror”: a Tanzanian case study’. African Affairs 105 (2006), 583-603.
