Location: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (map)
Caroline Elkins
Guest Lecturer and Chair of the Committee on African Studies; Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Mau Mau on Trial: Historical Revisionism and the High Court of Justice
Professor Elkins’s first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, documents the camp detention system maintained by the British in Kenya during the 1950’s. Elkins argues that in the effort to halt the Mau Mau rebellion by the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, colonial officials and settlers systematically perpetrated atrocities against suspected participants of the uprising. Imperial Reckoning was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, selected as one of the Economist’s best history books for 2005, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice in 2005, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Award in 2006. Professor Elkins is at work on a project which examines the effects of violence and amnesia on local communities and nation-building in post-independent Kenya. Her Twilight: The End of the British Empire after the Second World War (forthcoming, 2012) is a revisionist history on Britain’s counter-insurgency wars and the end of empire.
Free and open to the public. A question and answer session will follow the lecture. Please feel free to bring a lunch.
A recording of this event will be made available in Harvard's Widener Library.