Gerard McCann
Senior Lecturer in Modern History

Profile

Biography

BA, MPhil, PhD (Cantab)‌

Gerard is a Senior Lecturer in Modern Global History in the History Department. Before joining York, and after time as a political risk consultant in the City of London, he was a postdoctoral fellow in geography at the University of Cambridge and then Mellon Fellow in Transnational History at the University of Oxford. He completed his PhD, on Sikh diasporas in East Africa and Southeast Asia, at the University of Cambridge.

He studies international, transnational, African and South Asian history with two major interests. One is East Africa (and increasingly West Africa) in the era of decolonisation, thinking about how African freedom struggle from European imperialism and its post-colonial aftermath was influenced by global connections. His work to date here is especially focused on Kenya and Uganda. His other major interest is Afro-Asian connection, particularly India-Africa affairs, over the longer twentieth and twenty-first century, both through transnational diasporas since the late nineteenth century and internationalist networks since the 1950s. His current research pivots towards the intersections of African decolonisation, cultural production (literature, art and music) and the cultural Cold War in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Zambia and South Africa.

He has held several visiting positions overseas at the US National History Centre Research Seminar on Decolonization at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; World History Centre, University of Pittsburgh; Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas-at-Austin and University of Nairobi, Kenya. He served on the ‘Global Africa Group’ Steering Committee of the World Universities Network and for the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission. He is also a former Director of the Centre for Modern Studies (Faculty of Arts and Humanities) at York and elected member of the University Senate.

He engages with policy makers on African, South Asian and other global affairs, notably Indian and other Asian diplomatic, economic and cultural engagements in contemporary Africa. Such outreach has included briefings to and discussions with the US Department of State; US National Intelligence Council; UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House); Spanish Government’s ‘Casa Africa’; Government of São Paolo, Brazil; YouGov; Open Society Institute and BBC.

Research

Overview

Gerard’s early research focused on India-Africa connections along two strands. The first centred Indian diaspora in East Africa, especially its urban history, networks of labour activism, social history and problematic place of South Asians (and India as a post-colonial state) in African anti-colonialisms. The second, in collaboration with Emma Mawdsley (Cambridge), specialised in India’s contemporary and rejuvenated outreach to Africa resulting in several publications and an edited collection, ‘India and Africa: changing geographies of power and development’ on Afro-Asian international relations, African political economy and dynamics of a so-called (and highly problematic as a term) ‘global south’ in the twenty-first century.

This informed collaborative endeavours with the ‘Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective’ led by Su-Lin Lewis (Bristol) and Carolien Stolte (Leiden), which resulted in his publications on East African labour and radical history, reflections on the centrality of Africans in Afro-Asian solidarities during the ‘Bandung moment’ in the 1950s and 1960s, and a collaborative manifesto on doing connected histories of Afro-Asia.

The next phase pivoted to East Africa within such global history in the era of decolonisation. With Emma Hunter (Edinburgh), Ismay Milford (Leipzig) and Dan Branch (Warwick), he participated in a Leverhulme-funded project ‘Another World? East Africa and the global 1960s’, which resulted, amongst other academic and public facing things, in the book ‘Beyond Federation: East African regionalism in a national and global age, 1950-1975’.

His current research builds on this book to centre African cultures of decolonisation. It asks how African writers, artists, musicians and other activists worked within global, regional and local networks to imagine worlds after empire in the global 1960s and 1970s. Much of this endeavour focuses on the history of Africa’s most daring literary magazines, Transition (Uganda) and Black Orpheus (Nigeria), wider African print cultures of the age, as well as the fortunes of itinerant South African jazz musicians, Nigerian poets, Kenyan visual artists and a wide cast of actors who laboured to define the nature of African decolonisation in this exciting, anxious and combustible period. This research also necessarily looks at the entanglements of these cultural actors with the cultural Cold War, not least the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the lingering influence of British cultural institutions in decolonising Africa.

Projects

Another World? East Africa and the global 1960s 
Levehulme-funded project with Emma Hunter (Edinburgh), Dan Branch (Warwick) & Ismay Milford (Edinburgh) – 2018-2022

Afro-Asian visions: new perspectives on decolonisation and the Cold War
Research network with Su Lin Lewis (Bristol), Carolien Stolte (Leiden), Rachel Leow (Cambridge), Leslie James (QMUL), Ali Raza (Lahore University of Management Sciences) and others. 

Negotiating region and state after independence: imagining and (de)constructing integration in East Africa, 1960s-70s
Initially funded by the British Academy with Chris Vaughan (Liverpool John Moores), Emma Hunter (Edinburgh) & Julie MacArthur (Toronto)

Fraternal Reckonings: East Africa and India over the twentieth century

He is a strong believer in the scholarly desirability and indeed ethical necessity of collaboration in producing global, multi-centred historical research. History has been slow to this overdue turn. You can read more in a co-written manifesto published in Radical History Review in 2018.

Supervision

Dr McCann welcomes research students in many areas of African, South Asian, transnational and global history, especially topics looking to global connections in the era of decolonisation, East African studies, Afro-Asian relations and cultures of decolonisation. PhD topics completed or currently supervised:

• The Orchestra on the Titanic: Oxfam and Kenya, 1963-2011.
• Decolonisation, Cold War and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in India, 1950-67.
• Mau Mau and cultures of colonial bureaucracy in Kenya.
• Women’s writing and decolonisation in East Africa’s global 1960s.

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00104C Arguments and Analysis
• HIS00142I From the Global Shadows: Africa and the World since the 1950s
• HIS00188H The Ghosts of Gandhi: India & Africa since the nineteenth century

Postgraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00010M Approaches to Modern History
• HIS00185M The Cultural Cold War in Africa