Stephen Volz joined the Kenyon faculty in 2004 and became an Associate Professor in 2010. His general field of expertise is African history, with particular interest in Africa's cultural and political interactions with other regions of the world. His first exposure to Africa was as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Botswana, where he taught science at a rural junior high school, and after acquiring a M.A. in Teaching from Washington University, he taught social studies at a high school in New York City. Research for his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin took him back to southern Africa, and his dissertation and other recent projects explore the development of relations between Tswana and Europeans in the interior of southern Africa during the nineteenth century.

Areas of Expertise

Southern Africa, colonialism, history of religion

Education

University of Wisconsin - Madison (M.A., Ph.D.)
Washington University (M.A.T.)
Valparaiso University (B.A.)

Selected Publications

"Them who kill the body: Christian ideals and political realities in the interior of southern Africa during the 1850s" Journal of Southern African Studies 36,1 (2010) 41-56

"Conflict and negotiation along the lower Vaal River: correspondence from the Tswana-language newspaper Mokaeri oa Becuana", editor and translator with Part T. Mgadla ; in P. Limb, N. Etherington and P. Midgley (eds.), Grappling with the Beast: Indigenous Southern African Responses to Colonialism, 1840-1930 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 157-211

"Written on our hearts: Tswana Christians and the 'word of God' in the mid-nineteenth century" Journal of Religion in Africa 38,2 (2008) 112-140

Words of Batswana: Letters to Mahoko a Becwana, 1883-1896, editor and translator, with Part T. Mgadla (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2006)

"European missionaries and the development of Tswana identity" Le Fait Missionnaire: Social Sciences and Missions 15 (2004) 97-128

Courses Taught

HIST 145 Early African History
HIST 146 Modern Africa
HIST 192 The Making of the Contemporary World
HIST 242 Americans in Africa
HIST 341 African Women in Fiction and Film
HIST 345 History of the Indian Ocean
HIST 350 Race, Resistance, and Revolution in South Africa
HIST 387 Practice and Theory of History
HIST 444 Faith and Power in Africa
INST 201 Expansion of International Society