Barbara Cooper

Barbara Cooper is professor of African History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, USA.  Her research focuses on gender, family life, religion, reproductive health and family law, particularly in the Sahel. She is the author of Countless Blessings: A History of Childbirth and Reproduction in the Sahel (Indiana, 2019), Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Indiana, 2006) and Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989 (Heinemann, 1997). She is co-editor with Catherine Baroin of the collection La Honte au Sahel (Sépia, 2018). Her current project offers case studies of historical debates on Christianity in Africa, provisionally entitled Conversations chrétiennes.

The project

Title: Gender dynamics in Africa

 « “Mystics, saints and heretics: noisy women at the margins of the history of Christianity in Africa” Much of the work on the history of Christianity in Africa draws upon sources that place male figures at the center, yet women have often been at the heart of religious life. My current research project is a book offering case studies of important moments of disputation among African Christians and their interlocutors. The book is intended as both an overview of the history of Christianity in Africa that can serve as a textbook featuring primary sources and an intervention into our ways of approaching that history. Many sources place literate male figures (missionaries, priests, male converts) at the center of the story, in part because they were often literate and left archival traces. Yet we know that women and gender divergent individuals have often energized Christian life and spirituality in Africa. In this seminar I will discuss how counterbalancing well known male figures and text-based traces with some of the figures on the margins whose traces are often aural, performative, and spatial, provides a more thought provoking glimpse of some of the irresolvable debates at the heart of the religious experience in Africa and elsewhere. »

Hosting institution: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

Selective Bibliography

• Genres et générations en difficulté dans le Sahel contemporain, Politique africaine 161-62 (1-2) 2021, 265-89.
•  “Women in West African History,” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, February 2020. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.197
• “Traveling Companions: The Burial of the Placenta in Niger.” African Studies Review, vol. 62, 2, 2019, 127–148.
• “The Sahel in West African History,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, Sept. 2018.  DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.167
• “Maternal Health in Niger and the Evangelical Imperative: the Life of a Missionary Nurse in the Post-war Era,” in Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present edited by Barbara Cooper, Gary Corwin, Tibebe Eshete, Musa Gaiya, Tim Geysbeek and Shobana Shankar, Trenton: Africa World Press, 2018, 287-312.
• “Regard historique sur la honte et les pratiques reproductives au Soudan Central, » in La Honte au Sahel edited by Catherine Baroin and Barbara Cooper, Paris: Sépia, 2018, 51-100.