David Bresnahan

David Bresnahan is a doctoral student in African history. He holds an MA in history from Ohio University where he researched colonial-era discourses surrounding sacred sites and traditional authority in coastal Kenya. His current research interests focus on precolonial coastal East Africa. He will use the Scott Kloek-Jenson fellowship to travel to Kenya and Tanzania this summer and begin research for his dissertation which will examine the shaping and transformation of ideas about community, identity, and difference in Mombasa and its hinterlands prior to British colonialism. The dissertation project will utilize a range of source materials, drawing from written and oral sources, historical linguistics, and archaeology, to develop a richer historical narrative of the understudied communities in the coastal hinterland region and the Swahili commercial centers with which they were intimately connected.

Read on about David’s fellowship experience in Kenya & Tanzania here.