RESEARCH

My research focuses on parts of  Guinea-Conakry, Senegal and Mali. My methodology employs the tools of historians, namely the analysis and contextualization of archival documents and secondary studies, but it also draws on approaches from anthropology, art history, material culture and spatial analysis.

My research and conference presentations have been transnational in scope. I have presented papers in the United States, Senegal, Guinea-Conakry, Mali, Ivory Coast, France, Britain, Canada, India and Switzerland.

My current book project, The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce, and History in West Africa, 1700-1850, re-examines historical change across a region of western Africa from Senegal to Sierra Leone from the perspective of the trans-regional commerce in textiles, a major trade that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were effectively global in scale. This research illuminates African peoples’ varied engagements with the global economy in the early modern period beyond Atlantic slaving. It considers the significance of a regional African indigo cloth economy to wider commercial exchanges, that of India as a source of textiles desired by African merchants and consumers, and that of the Indian Ocean generally to West African and Atlantic networks.