Clifton Crais

Clifton Crais, Professor (B.A., University of Maryland, 1982; M.A., Johns Hopkins, 1984; Ph.D., 1988). His research interests are in African history, especially Southern Africa, state formation and political culture, inequality, comparative empire and world history, biography and heterography, the histories and anthropologies of violence, and the organization of knowledge across the humanities and interpretative social sciences. He is author, with Pamela Scully (African Studies and Women’s Studies) of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, 2008) on the woman more famously known as the “Hottentot Venus,” and about whom a feature film is now being made; The Politics of Evil: Magic, Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa (Cambridge, 2002), White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1992), editor of The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth, 2003), co-editor of Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg and Bloomington, 1995), Area Editor of Encyclopedia of World History, 8 vol. (Oxford University Press, 2008), in addition to other works. With Pamela Scully, Crais is completing a documentary history of South Africa. He recently completed his first novel, The Memory Box, and is currently writing a memoir, History Lessons. In addition, he has begun work on a world history of violence, provisionally entitled Terror, Suffering, and the Fate of Humankind.

Curriculum Vitae