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Paul Landau

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Professor, History

(301) 405-4291

2132 Taliaferro Hall
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Research Expertise

Africa
Global Interaction and Exchange

Curriculum Vitae


I am Paul Landau, a History professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. I come to what I do by way of African studies.


I teach classes about South Africa, African cities, ethnic groups and where they come from, South Africans' actual political heritage, Christianity, prophetic and political movements in West Africa and the Atlantic world, pictures and cinema and colonialism, and mid-20th century revolutionary movements and the Cold War in Africa.


My field is (southern) Africa. I am still rooted in "area studies" thinking. It goes along quite well with transnational patterns and connections. I do not like social science studies without either an argument, or a narrative, so for me, History is a Humanities subject. The best works of History are among the best books to read, period. 


I have always been interested in other ways of understanding the world, not my own. In Africa, such ways were put forward by earlier literature as "beliefs." That did not seem good enough to me.


I read anthropology, mostly about Africa, and the philosopher Wittgenstein, and I became preoccupied with the history of perception and thought among colonized people: how distorted the treatment was, and how it reflected colonial power. Distrusting the whole idea of mindsets, and so statements about what others believe, I instead tried to look very carefully at specific historical situations, paying attention to language. This way of approaching things began for me when I was an acolyte of Steven Feierman and Jan Vansina at the University of Wisconsin.


It has also been important to me to be able to work in SeTswana and (a little bit) in IsiZulu, and (re)translate voices and encounters back into English. I studied these languages with (the late) Daniel Kunene, and with Part Themba Mgadla and Jennifer Yanco.


I taught for three years at the University of New Hampshire, for four years at Yale University, and from 1999 on as an associate professor, and then a full professor, here at Maryland. I am a fellow at the History Centre at the University of Johannesburg and am participating this year at the University of the Western Cape.


At present, I'm writing about violence and revolutionary ferment in South Africa in 1960-3. My sources are almost all English-language interviews or memoirs. I am facing the same challenge as always: to understand what participants did and what they thought about what they were doing. I also read manuscripts, article submissions to various journals, and take a special interest in the African Historical Review, where I was the co-editor for five years and helped produce some excellent issues, including a special issue on Xenophobia in South Africa.


Paywall, but: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rahr20/44/1


Some things I have written:

BOOKS

Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) Winner,American Historical Association Martin Klein Prize for Best English Language Work in African History, 2023


The Realm of the Word: Language, Gender and Christianity in a Southern African Kingdom (Heinemann,1995) Finalist, African Studies Association Best Book (Herskovits) Prize

 

ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS

“Transformations in Consciousness,” the last chapter in the two-volume Cambridge History of South Africa, Vol. 1 : From Early Times to 1885\. Carolyn Hamilton, Bernard K. Mbenga,  Robert Ross, eds Cambridge University Press, 2010).


"Language" for the Companion series to the Oxford History of the British Empire, a volume edited by Norman Etherington, called Missions and Empire. 2005.


Orig. nondigital and behind a paywall: "The Image of Christ in the Kalahari Desert," Representations, 45 (1994), 26-40.


Same: "Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith," Journal of African History, 37, 2 (1996), 261-281.


Same: "Hegemony and History in Jean and John L. Comaroff's "Of Revelation and Revolution"," Africa: Journal of the International African Institute70, No. 3 (2000), pp. 501-519.


Co-edited book (with Deborah Kaspin), Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa (Univ. of Cal., 2002).


Popular Politics in the History of South Africa, 1400 to 1948 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), "finalist for the Herskovits prize".


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/482075/pdf


which is: "The ANC, MK, and 'the Turn to Violence,'" 2012, in The South African Historical Journal, no longer behind a paywall.


http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02582473.2012.660785


(And see the companion piece, "Controlled by Communists? (Re)Assessing the ANC in its Exilic Decades," in the same journal, 2015, if you have a Muse or Jstor connection to SAHJ.)


I have also written essays on religion and missionaries (two big essays, one based on archival research) for German publications that will be seen by . . . very few English-speaking people. I will post a link to one of or both of them here at some point.

Just out in June, 2022 is Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries, with Jacana Press in Johannesburg and with Ohio University Press in the USA and Great Britain

In it as in other work, I have tried to make modern history and politics, and Africans' political inclinations, aspects of one story, accessible to as many as possible.

In 2020 and 2021 I spent a semester in two visits in the University of Leipzig KFG multi-year project as a senior fellow, the "Multiple Secularities, Multiple Modernities" program. My next project will be about the international anti-apartheid movement.

Email: PLandau@umd.edu.

*

I have an appointment as Senior Fellow of Historical Studies at the University of Johannesburg and an adjunct in the African American Studies Department at Maryland.

 

Awards & Grants

Paul Landau Wins the Martin A. Klein Prize in African History

Distinguished Work of Scholarship on African History

History

Author/Lead: Paul Landau
Dates:
Award Organization:

Martin A. Klein Prize | American Historical Association 

Inset image

Paul Landau has been awarded the Martin A. Klein Prize from the American Historical Association for his book Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022). 

The Martin A. Klein Prize in African History recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous calendar year. The prize is named for Martin A. Klein, who is currently professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto.

Publications

Paul Landau Wins the Martin A. Klein Prize in African History

Distinguished Work of Scholarship on African History

History

Author/Lead: Paul Landau
Dates:
Award Organization:

Martin A. Klein Prize | American Historical Association 

Inset image

Paul Landau has been awarded the Martin A. Klein Prize from the American Historical Association for his book Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022). 

The Martin A. Klein Prize in African History recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous calendar year. The prize is named for Martin A. Klein, who is currently professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto.

Paul S. Landau | Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries

Paul S. Landau's new book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries has been published in the US by Ohio University Press.

History

Author/Lead: Paul Landau
Dates:
Inset image

Paul S. Landau's new book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries has been published in the US by Ohio University Press. Reviewers have hailed the book as a "tour de force" which sheds much new light on the relationship between South African rebels against apartheid and violence. One reviewer wrote on the publisher's website: "Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries is one of the most important books on South Africa to appear in more than a generation. A masterpiece of analysis and careful historical reconstruction, Landau revisits a crucial moment in the country’s modern history, when a group of activists turned revolutionaries led by Nelson Mandela pursued the overthrow of the racist apartheid state."

See the publisher's website here.

Paul Landau Interviewed about Recent Book, Spear

Landau' Interview: Spear

History

Author/Lead: Paul Landau
Dates: -
Inset image

Paul S. Landau is interviewed about his new book, Spear: Mandela and the Revolutionaries (Ohio University Press, 2022) on H-Nets New Books Network. The moderator Rabrecus Toles says of the book: "Landau complicates the whitewashed “grandpa” figure so many of us have come to know Mandela to be. He gives us a detailed glimpse into the mind of the revolutionary and oftentimes violent Nelson Mandela that we so anxiously want to know." The book has been praised in many quarters as presenting a vital new view of Mandela's role in the end of apartheid.

Hear the full interview HERE.