Elizabeth MacGonagle

Contact Information Phone: (785)864-9452 Office: 3619 Wescoe Hall Email: macgonag@ku.edu

Assoc. Prof. (Ph.D. Michigan State, 2002; M.A. Michigan State, 1996; B.A. Trinity College, Hartford, CT, 1990) African history and Comparative Black history with interests in social and cultural history and gender studies.

Prof. MacGonagle's current research draws on African oral histories, archival documents and material culture to examine the shaping of identities over several centuries in the Ndau region of eastern Zimbabwe and central Mozambique. In 1998-1999 she interviewed Ndau elders throughout the region and consulted archives in Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Portugal with support from a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. An article on using early Portuguese documents as historical sources, "Mightier than the Sword: The Portuguese Pen in Ndau History," was published in History in Africa in 2001. Her next research project will examine the politics and power of ethnic awareness in southeast Africa during the twentieth century. In addition to fieldwork in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, she has also spent time in South Africa, Swaziland, Kenya and Zanzibar. Prof. MacGonagle speaks Portuguese and Ndau, a dialect of Shona.

In addition to fieldwork in Mozambique and Zimbabwe, she has also spent time in Africa in Ghana, Togo, Zambia, South Africa, Swaziland, Kenya and Zanzibar. She published an article on the changing use of Ghana ’s slave forts in the Journal of Contemporary African Studies in 2006. Prof. MacGonagle collaborated with Ken Lohrentz (KU Libraries) to digitize a portion of the Onitsha Market Literature collection held at KU's Spencer Research Library in 2003-2004. Selections of this popular Nigerian literature, along with a companion website, are on the Internet at http://onitsha.diglib.ku.edu/. In 2004, she received a Fulbright fellowship to teach African history at the University of Iceland.

Prof. MacGonagle teaches African history at KU in the departments of History and African & African-American Studies. She has training in Comparative Black history and interests in social and cultural history and gender studies. Her course offerings include: Sexuality and Gender in African History (HIST 598/AAAS 598), Modern African History (HIST 300/ AAAS 305), Introduction to African History (HIST 104/AAAS 105), Historical Methods (HIST 393), and graduate seminars in African history and comparative women’s history.

At KU, Prof. MacGonagle is an executive committee member of the Kansas African Studies Center and a member of the university-wide African Studies Council. She is also a member of the African Studies Association, Lusophone African Studies Organization (LAÇO), Association of Concerned Africa Scholars and Mid-America Alliance for African Studies.