University of Reading cookie policy

We use cookies on reading.ac.uk to improve your experience, monitor site performance and tailor content to you

Read our cookie policy to find out how to manage your cookie settings

Heike Schmidt

Heike Schmidt

Director of Dissertations

Areas of interest

My passion for Africa began during a study abroad year at the University of Zimbabwe. I have since become a historian of modern Africa, with my area of specialty being the history of Southern as well as East Africa, in particular Zimbabwe and Tanzania in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have always had a decolonising approach to my research, teaching, and to my citizenship at my workplace. Currently, I am shifting my research agenda - not least taking accountability for my own positionality as a white European historian of African lives - to race and white privilege. My research and my publications are rooted in extensive fieldwork which includes undertaking oral history interviews as well as archival studies in Africa.

  • gender
  • violence & conflict
  • race & white privilege
  • nation & nationalism
  • compared colonialisms
  • religion
  • memory

Postgraduate supervision

Current supervision

  • Richard Balzano - Oil, Aid, and Human Rights: U.S.-Guatemalan Relations and the Political Economy of National Interest, 1979-1983
  • Noel Mutasa - Decrypting the single narrative of Zimbabwe’s liberation history: An erudite revisit of Ndabaningi Sithole, the Nhari Rebellion, Mgagao Declaration and the Vashandi Group, 1974 to 1979
  • Shepherd Mutswiri - A Negotiated settlement: Faith, Nationalism, and Women’s Political Imagination in the Decolonisation of Zimbabwe, 1960 to 1980

Previous supervision

  • Bethany Rebisz (AHRC SWW DTP funded)- Losing the Hearts and Minds: The Role of Aid in Counter-Insurgency Warfare in Kenya, 1952-1960

Postgraduate research teaching/skills

I welcome PhD students in Modern African History. I encourage especially those intending to research Southern or East Africa who are interested in gender or conflict.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Foundation Year – Contribution to Presenting and Representing

Part One Option - The Rwanda Genocide of 1994

Part Two Option - The Colonial Experience, Africa 1879 to 1980

Part Three Topic - Africa from European Settlement to Nelson Mandela (South Africa and Zimbabwe)

Part Three Subject - Gender in Africa

Part Three Dissertation Supervision

Postgraduate MA (postgraduate taught)

Option: Violence and Conflict in Twentieth Century Africa

Theory and Themes: Postcolonial History

Independent Study Supervision

Dissertation Supervision 

Research centres and groups

  • Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
  • Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Websites/blogs

Selected publications

 

Impact and public engagement

Television interviews – Al Jazeera ‘Inside Story’, France 24, ITV ‘Good Morning Britain’, ORF (Austria), 3SAT (Germany), Sky News, TRT World.

Radio interviews – LBC.

The Conversation articles

Publications

Loading your publications ...