Dr Steven Pierce
steven.pierce@manchester.ac.uk
Ext: 53146
Room: N2.4 Humanities Lime Grove
I studied political science as an undergraduate at Yale University and then received a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 2000. Before coming to Manchester in January 2006, I taught for five years in the history department at Tulane University. I am a specialist in sub-Saharan Africa, and my research centers in and around the city of Kano in northern Nigeria, focusing on issues of law, politics, colonialism, social theory, gender, and semiotics.
My first book, Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2005) is a study of the colonial government of northern Nigeria, looking at the way in which rights in land became the primary idiom for governing small-scale farmers. My new research examines the politics of shari'a criminal law in colonial and postcolonial northern Nigeria. It concentrates on three periods in which Nigerian shari'a came to national and international attention: from 1900-1933, when flogging regularly caused international scandals; from 1948-1959, when capital cases of homicide proved a potent issue in nationalist politics and the shari'a courts lost criminal jurisdiction; and since 1999, when the courts regained jurisdiction. The book emerging from the research will examine the ways in which Islamic criminal law has been increasingly politicized, functioning across the century to define political communities and to determine the contours of state and communal violence.
An essay emerging from this research appears in a book I have edited in collaboration with Professor Anupama Rao of Barnard College, Columbia University, entitled Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, which will be published by Duke University Press in June 2006. The volume examines the relationship between bodily violence and categories of difference such as race, religion, and gender, tracing the intimate relationship between strategies of governance and often-intertwined discourses of humanitarianism and bigotry. Professor Rao and I continue our collaboration, starting work on a new project on the history of humanitarianism and human rights. I am also in the early stages of planning a second collaboration, this one with Professor Susan O'Brien of the University of Florida, on the politics of religious mobilization in northern Nigeria. I also am at work on a series of articles on gender issues.
Teaching:
I have taught broadly on the history of sub-Saharan Africa, and also on issues of gender and gender theory, comparative colonialism, historical anthropology, and social theory. At Manchester, I teach courses on non-European history, colonialism, gender, and sub-Saharan Africa.
I welcome inquiries from research students, particularly those interested in the history of sub-Saharan Africa and in historical anthropology.