I am a historian of modern African and global history at the National Institute of Education (part of the Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. I specialize in histories of education, development, and decolonization in the 20th century.
My research explores how schooling came to be imagined as part of larger projects of emancipation—from colonial rule, from material need, and from oppressive racial and imperial ideologies.
My first book, An Anticolonial Development: Public Schooling, Emancipation, and its Limits in 20th Century West Africa, is under contract with the African Studies series of Cambridge University Press. It is due out in 2025.
I am currently developing a new research project, When Economists Discovered Education: Growth, Freedom and Development in the Postcolonial World (1955–1975). This project examines the ways that economistic thinking began to be applied to global education in the 1950s and 1960s. It interrogates how and why education became central to understandings of economic development in the age of decolonization.
My first book, An Anticolonial Development: Public Schooling, Emancipation, and its Limits in 20th Century West Africa, is under contract with the African Studies series of Cambridge University Press. It is due out in 2025.
I am currently developing a new research project, When Economists Discovered Education: Growth, Freedom and Development in the Postcolonial World (1955–1975). This project examines the ways that economistic thinking began to be applied to global education in the 1950s and 1960s. It interrogates how and why education became central to understandings of economic development in the age of decolonization.