Gregory Mann
Professor of History
Gregory Mann is an historian of West and francophone Africa. His work has focused largely on Mali and the Sahel in the twentieth century, including both the colonial and the postcolonial periods. Mann has written two books: From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the Road to Nongovernmentality (2015) and Native Sons: West African Veterans and France (2006). Each analyzes an aspect of governmentality, or the forms of governmental logic that animate life and struggle in the seam between state and society. Mann has also published a score of peer-reviewed articles—notably in the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and the Journal of African History—on themes ranging from pilgrimage to migration, human rights, the history of the social sciences, and the historiography of Africa. He is currently writing a synthetic book-length essay on the historical relationship between Africa and France, from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century.
Mann is a former editor of the Journal of African History, and a member of the editorial boards of that journal and of Humanity. He is a member—along with Dr. Devon Golaszewski, Madina Thiam and Oumou Sidibe—of the Projet Archives des Femmes du Mali, a project funded by the Modern Endangered Archives Program at UCLA. He is former director of Columbia’s M.A. program in History and Literature (Paris).
Mann has been a visiting professor at Paris-VIII (St. Denis), Sciences Po (Paris), and Paris-I Sorbonne-Panthéon. He has also co-organized a number of workshops and programs with colleagues at the University of Bamako. He has been a fellow of the Stanford Humanities Center and has won numerous other fellowships and awards.
Mann has worked with a number of doctoral students on dissertations in history, anthropology and political science, as well as with Master’s students in the Columbia-LSE Dual Degree Program in International and World History. Queries from prospective students are welcome.