| 1 | Name: | Dr. Frederick Cooper | |
| Institution: | New York University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2024 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1947 | ||
Frederick Cooper has been studying Africa since his undergraduate days at Stanford in the 1960s. His approach to African history, in research and teaching, has emphasized changing perspectives: zooming in through detailed research on the particularities of place and time within a diverse continent, zooming out to explore connections across space and patterns over time. He has been concerned with how to understand and employ social theory in relation to historically specific situations. The “East African” phase of his career resulted in three books on slavery and post-emancipation agricultural labor in Zanzibar and Kenya (1977, 1980) and on urban labor in Kenya (1987). While these works were influenced by the literature on comparative slavery in the Americas and on labor and capitalist development in Europe, Cooper did not take western cases as a paradigm against which the rest of the world should be held but insisted that African material should lead to rethinking conceptual schemes themselves. During these years, Cooper also wrote field-defining essays on slavery in Africa (1979) and on Africa’s relation to the world economy (1981). He began to work on the politics of colonialism in collaboration with the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, resulting in an international conference and a co-edited book Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997). Meanwhile, Cooper’s archival research turned toward the study of the relationship of labor to decolonization and economic development and expanded to include French Africa, ending up with a monograph (1996) as well as a co-edited book on development and the social sciences (1997). Cooper’s interest in social science theory was developed through critical essays on the concepts of identity, globalization, modernity, nation-state, and empire, collected in his 2005 book Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, which earned him the reputation among his friends as “concept cop.” He was encouraged by years of conversation with his spouse, the Russian historian Jane Burbank, to think beyond the 1st-3rd world orientation and modernist bias of colonial studies. Burbank and Cooper took the leap of developing a year-long graduate course at the University of Michigan on empires in world history. When they both moved to New York University in 2002, they took the course with them and then developed an undergraduate course on the same theme. Their teaching in turn led them to write Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010), which has been translated into nine languages, won a book prize from the World History Association, and was a key element in the award to Burbank and Cooper of the Arnold Toynbee Prize in 2023 for contributions to global history. This spousal collective produced another book, Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (2023). Cooper, along the way, wrote a monograph on citizenship and decolonization in France and French Africa (2014) and synthetic and analytical books on Africa’s place in the world (2014) and citizenship in world history (2018), as well as a textbook on contemporary African history (2nd ed. 2019). Cooper’s teaching career went from Harvard to Michigan to NYU. He regularly taught courses in African history as well as on slavery, post-emancipation societies, colonialism, economic development, and empires. He has worked with PhD students who have gone on to stellar careers. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in France, where he has many close friends and colleagues, and he has given talks at universities and research centers in Africa, Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia. In addition to Empires in World History, others of his books and articles have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Italian. His research, over the years, in Great Britain, France, Kenya, and Senegal has been aided by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and, at an early career stage, the American Philosophical Society. His writing benefitted from residential fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Institut d’Études Avancées de Nantes, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the Center on Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History in Berlin, the Humanities Institute at Michigan, and the Remarque Institute at NYU. He retired from teaching in 2020 but continues to write, lecture, and participate in a variety of academic events. | |||