Florence Bernault
Professor

eMail: bernault@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-5424
Office: 4131 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4006 Mosse Humanities

Website: http://history.wisc.edu/bernault/

Office Hours: Mondays 3:50 - 5:15

Education: PhD: University of Paris-Diderot; MA: University of Paris-Sorbonne; BA: University of Paris-Sorbonne

Bio Sketch:

My specializations are Equatorial African History and Contemporary Africa. I teach and research on the formation of modern identities, nation-states, and popular culture in West and Equatorial Africa, mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I offer courses on Africa since 1870, on Equatorial Africa since 1500, on Slavery in West Africa, on Postcolonial Africa, and on the history of Witchcraft. My work so far has discussed political crises in the 1930s-1960s in Congo-Brazzaville and Gabon, and modern forms of punishment in sub-Saharan Africa, in particular custodial imprisonment. I currently investigate the history of magic in colonial Gabon, and more broadly, the cross-emergence of black and white anxieties about the sacred since the late 19th century. As the realm of magic became entangled in colonial assaults, African initiatives and global fluxes, it prompted the reworking of key representations, involving accepted divides between the material and immaterial, the sacred and the profane, and the value of social and monetary transactions. Magic and the sacred thus opened significant windows on the nature of power relationships during colonialism. Finally, I also work and write on the ways in which colonial history impacts France’s current debates about citizenship, naturalization, immigration and colonial debt.

Selected Publications: (see my website)

• Démocraties ambigües en Afrique centrale: Congo-Brazzaville, Gabon, 1940-1965 (Paris: Karthala editions, 1996)
• A History of Prison and Confinement in Africa (Portsmouth, NJ: Heinemann, 2003), editor
• “L'Afrique et la modernité des sciences sociales,” Vingtième siècle.  Revue d'histoire (Paris), 70 (2001), pp. 127-38
• “Body, Power and Sacrifice in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History, 47/2 (2006), pp. 207-39

Awards:

• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2001
• H. I. Romnes Faculty Award, University of Wisconsin, 2000-2005
• Fellow, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Spring 2000
• Vilas Associateship, University of Wisconsin, 1998-2000
  

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 378 - History of Africa Since 1870
• History 445 - History of Equatorial Africa - Syllabus 2008 (pdf)

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "History of Africa "; "Imagining Africa (19th‐21st centuries)" Syllabus 2008 (pdf)

Graduate Courses:

• History 703 - History and Theory
• History 751 - Proseminar in the History of Africa
• History 861 - Seminar in the History of Africa

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