Elisabeth McMahon

Elisabeth McMahon is an associate professor of African history at Tulane University. Her first book, Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa: From Honor to Respectability (2013), uses Qadi and probate court records on Pemba Island to explore the gendered social dynamics of emancipation. She co-authored, with Corrie Decker, The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (2020). Founder of the African Letters Project (https://africanlettersproject.tulane.edu/), McMahon centers the use of digital technologies to bring a more capacious vision of African and American connections during post-World War II decolonization. She has published numerous articles and book chapters as well. McMahon is currently writing a book that explores the violence associated with the East African slave trade and slavery between 1840 and 1910, as the household was redefined by competing colonizers. By focusing on both the Omani and British colonial eras, it exposes the crucial way enslaved and free females affected political history in littoral East Africa.