Emily Lynn Osborn

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.