Esther Ginestet

she/her

Asst Professor

Africa (East Africa)

Withers Hall 364

[email protected]

Bio

Bio:

Esther Ginestet’s research focuses on the history of ideas, ethnicity, childhood, and gender in East Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Broadly speaking, she is interested in how histories of enslavement, colonialism, migrations, age, and authoritarianism intersect. In her work, she investigates how women and men competed over expertise, struggled for communal belonging, and claimed individual status to navigate unsettling times, when public discussions of the past were becoming increasingly contentious and the future uncertain.

Her book project, “Communities of Destiny: Historical Imagination and Authority in Kenya, 1850s-1980s,” examines how four generations of women and men living along the northeastern shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya talked about the past to argue over propriety, seniority, and belonging in the face of dramatic social and political change.

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