Biography

I am a historian of African political thought and a former legal resident of Uganda, where I formally studied local languages and cultivated many networks that continue to shape my work. I earned my PhD in African history from Cambridge University in 2012, where I studied under Professors Derek Peterson and John Lonsdale. I currently serve as the Co-Chair of the Uganda Studies Group of the African Studies Association, the largest international body devoted to the study of Uganda. I am an associate professor of African history at Centre College and an International Research Fellow for the Kingdom of Buganda. I was elected a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2021, where I have been re-elected for 2024–2025.

I am the founding editor of the Cambridge History of African Political Thought, and Senior Editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, where he oversees commissions on African intellectual history. I am currently writing a popular book on Theodore Roosevelt’s African expedition and how Ugandan diplomats changed American democracy. A summary of the story was recently published by POLITICO Magazine. The book’s film rights are under option with Unction Productions.

My first book on the Kingdom of Buganda’s colonial history (Cambridge University Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize of the African Studies Association. The Prize is awarded to the best book written on Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Somaliland, Tanzania, or Uganda. Colonial Buganda was one of the most important and richly documented kingdoms in East Africa. My book offers the first global intellectual history of the Kingdom, using a series of case studies, interviews and previously inaccessible private archives to offer new insights concerning the multiple narratives used by intellectuals. Where previous studies on literacy in Africa have presupposed 'sacred' or 'secular' categories, I argue that activists blurred European and Ugandan epistemologies as they reworked colonial knowledge into vernacular debates about kingship and empire. Furthermore, by presenting Catholic, Muslim and Protestant histories and political perspectives in conversation with one another, I offer a nuanced picture of the religious and social environment. Through the lives, politics, and historical contexts of these African intellectuals, the book presents an important argument about the end of empire, making the reader rethink the dynamics of political imagination and historical pluralism in the colonial and postcolonial state. Click here for reviews.

My second book, Contesting Catholics: Benedicto Kiwanuka and the Birth of Postcolonial Uganda (James Currey 2021), co-authored with James Jay Carney (Creighton), examines the career of Uganda’s first elected prime minister, Benedicto Kiwanuka. Assassinated by Idi Amin and a democratic ally of J.F. Kennedy during the Cold War, Benedicto Kiwanuka was Uganda's most controversial and disruptive politician, and his legacy is still divisive. On the eve of independence, he led the Democratic Party (DP), a national movement of predominantly Catholic activists, to end political inequalities and religious discrimination. Along the way, he became Uganda's first prime minister and first Ugandan chief justice. We show how Kiwanuka and Catholic activists struggled to create an inclusive vision of the state, a vision that resulted in relentless intimidation and extrajudicial killings. Focusing closely on the competing Catholic projects that circulated throughout Uganda, this book offers new ways of thinking about the history of democratic thought, while pushing the study of Catholicism in Africa outside of the church and beyond the gaze of missionaries. Drawing on never before seen sources from Kiwanuka's personal papers, we upend many of the assumptions that have framed Uganda's political and religious history for over sixty years, as well as repositioning Uganda's politics within the global arena. Click here for reviews.

For my work on Kiwanuka and the DP, I was invited to curate Uganda’s national exhibition on the Democratic Party during the country’s 60th Anniversary.

My third book is Decolonising State & Society in Uganda: The Politics of Knowledge & Public Life (James Currey, 2021). Co-edited with Katherine Bruce-Lockhart, Nakanyike Musisi and Edgar Taylor, the book rethinks ongoing debates about the decoloniation of African studies. Decolonization of knowledge has become a major issue in African Studies in recent years, brought to the fore by social movements such as #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter. This timely book explores the politics and disputed character of knowledge production in colonial and postcolonial Uganda, where efforts to generate forms of knowledge and solidarity that transcend colonial epistemologies draw on long histories of resistance and refusal. Bringing together scholars from Africa, Europe and North America, the contributors in this volume analyse how knowledge has been created, mobilized, and contested across a wide range of Ugandan contexts. In so doing, they reveal how Ugandans have built, disputed, and reimagined institutions of authority and knowledge production in ways that disrupt the colonial frames that continue to shape scholarly analyses and state structures. From the politics of language and gender in Bakiga naming practices to ways of knowing among the Acholi, the hampering of critical scholarship by militarism and authoritarianism, and debates over the names of streets, lakes, mountains, and other public spaces, this book shows how scholars and a wide range of Ugandan activists are reimagining the politics of knowledge in Ugandan public life.

My work on Uganda’s intellectual history has also appeared in the Journal of Eastern African History, History in Africa, and Journal of African History. My chapter on ‘African Intellectual History’ contributed to the Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources, which was awarded the Waldo G. Leland prize by the American Historical Association for the best reference work published over the past five years.

I have taken an active role in Uganda’s public history and heritage management. I helped catalogue the Uganda National Archives, resulting in a multi-million-dollar grant with UNESCO to relocate the state archives from Entebbe to Kampala. I worked with Ugandan archivists to preserve and develop the Soroti District Archives (in eastern Uganda). I have also digitized numerous private holdings, including the papers of the co-author of Uganda’s postcolonial constitution, Eridadi Mulira, whose material is now available online through Cambridge University Library.

My research animates my passion for teaching. At Cambridge, I facilitated tutorials, lectures, and seminars at the undergraduate and graduate levels, teaching broadly on the history of modern Africa and historical methodology. At Centre, I have developed a creative pedagogy, which often leads me to structure courses around community-based learning. I offer regular studies abroad in eastern Africa (2014, 2015, 2019) and co-directed the Centre-in-London program in 2017. With Dr. Katrin Bahr, I co-directed a study abroad in Germany and Poland (January 2022) on the colonial genealogies of the Holocaust. I have also worked with student researchers in Rwanda, Uganda, and the United Kingdom. I was awarded the Education Award of the Kentucky Historical Society in 2020. For outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service, I was appointed a Centre Scholar in 2016, 2019, and 2023, and awarded a Stodghill Research Professorship in 2017. Please see my CV for a full list of taught courses.

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Contact Jonathon L. Earle.