Department of History

Emily Callaci

Position title: Professor of History

Email: ejcallaci@wisc.edu

Phone: 608.262.6046

Address:
Office: 5125 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5028 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: Tuesday 11:30am-1:30pm

Emily Callaci

Biography

I am an historian of modern Africa, global feminism and decolonization. My first book, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania, explores the creative lives of urban migrant youth to the city of Dar es Salaam during Tanzania’s socialist era, from 1967 through 1985. Drawing together a range of unconventional sources, or “street archives,” my book reveals a world of cultural innovation, literary production, and the elaboration of a distinctly urban subjectivity among migrants and refugees in Dar es Salaam.

My second book Wages for Housework: The Story of a Movement, an Idea, a Promise is an intellectual and social history of the global Wages for Housework movement from the 1970s.

I am currently working on a third book, provisionally called Planning the African Family, which explores the intersection of decolonization and search for health and reproductive justice in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s-1980s.

I serve as co-editor of the American Historical Review series History Unclassified.

Education

Ph.D., Northwestern University
M.A., Northwestern University
B.A., Kenyon College

Books

Selected Publications

  • “Injectable Development:” Depo-Provera and the Mapping of the Global South,” Radical History Review 131, (May 2018).
  • “Street Textuality: Socialism, Masculinity and Urban Belonging in Tanzania’s Pulp Fiction Publishing Industry, 1975-1985,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59: 1 (2017).
  • “‘Chief Village in a Nation of Villages’: History, Race and Authority in Tanzania’s Dodoma Plan”, (forthcoming, Urban History, 2015).
  • “Dancehall Politics: Mobility, Sexuality, and Spectacles of Racial Respectability in Late Colonial Tanganyika, 1930s-1961,” The Journal of African History, 52:3, (2011).

Advisor To

Selected Awards

  • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2018
  • American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2015-16
  • UW Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities Residential Fellowship, 2015-16
  • UW Madison Center for the Humanities First Book Award, 2013-2014
  • Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, 2008-2009
  • U.S. Department of Education Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, 2006-2011
  • Graduate Research Grant, The Graduate School, Northwestern University, 2007 and 2010

History Courses

  • History 105 – Africa Since 1940 – Syllabus 2013 (pdf)
  • History 200 – Historical Studies: Global Reproductive Politics – Syllabus 2022 (pdf)
  • History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: African Decolonization – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
  • History 201 – The Historian’s Craft: History of Humanitarianism – Syllabus 2023 (pdf)
  • History 225 – Globalization and the African City – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
  • History 283 – Gender, Sexuality and the Making of the Self in Modern Africa – Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
  • History 330 – Global History of Humanitarianism – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
  • History 500 – The Pill and the World: Family Planning, Population Control and Feminism in World History – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
  • History 600 – Creative Historical Writing – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
  • History 600 – Decolonization and African Nationalism – Syllabus 2013 (pdf)
  • History 600 – The Global Anti-Apartheid Movement – Syllabus 2025 (pdf)
  • History 705 – Historical Approaches to Race and Reproduction
  • History 752 – Seminar in Transnational Gender History: Gender, Women, Sex and Feminism in transnational perspective – Syllabus 2021 (pdf)
  • History 861 – African Intellectual History – Syllabus 2020 (pdf)
  • History 861 – Historical Approaches to the Twentieth Century African City
  • History 861 – The African Postcolony