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 1:00-3:00pm

Emily Callaci

Biography

I am an historian of modern Africa. My interests include urban history, popular culture, gender, sexuality and reproductive politics. 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.

I am currently working on two new book projects. The first is a study of reproductive technology, family planning and the search for health and reproductive justice in sub-Saharan Africa in the 1960s-1980s. My central interest is in the work of African nurses and health workers who sought to bring health and build health infrastructures in their communities during a time when most foreign aid money and medical resources were disseminated according to the agenda of population control: an agenda that most African communities did not share.  I have recently begun working on a second book project on the intellectual and social history of the global Wages for Housework Movement of the 1970s.

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 2024 (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 500 – The Pill and the World: Family Planning, Population Control and Feminism in World History – Syllabus 2015 (pdf)
  • History 600 – Creative Historical Writing – Syllabus 2024 (pdf)
  • History 600 – Decolonization and African Nationalism – Syllabus 2013 (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