Associate Professor of African History, African Studies, and the College, Department of History
At the University of Chicago, Prof. Osborn teaches courses on precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial African history, as well as graduate and undergraduate seminars on African historiography; oral sources of history; gender and state-craft; slavery, the slave-trade, and the making of the Atlantic world.
She is a historian of Africa interested in using a variety of methodological tools and sources to study the African past. Her first book, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (The Ohio University Press), investigates a central puzzle in West African political history: why do women figure frequently in the political narratives of the precolonial period, and then vanish altogether with the French colonial occupation of the late-nineteenth century?
Her next book project, Recycling Traditions: Aluminum Casting and the Making of a Modern African Diaspora, is a transnational social and cultural history of technology transfer and diffusion.
Cultures, Creeds, Arts, & Society