Professor Daniel Branch
Professor in African History
Academic Director of Doctoral College
Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor, Africa
- Email: D.P.Branch@warwick.ac.uk
- Office: Faculty of Arts building, 3.80.
Please email me directly if you would like to make an appointment.
Academic career
I have been at Warwick since 2008. Between 2014 and 2019 I was head of department in History. I was also acting chair of the Faculty of Arts for a short period in 2019. I have been Academic Director of the Doctoral College since 2021. Over the same period, I have also been Academic Director for Africa - now Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor - within the university's International Executive. The latter role is shared with Professor Franklyn Lisk.
Before coming to Warwick, I had a post in History at the University of Exeter and a postdoctoral fellowship with the Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale University. I studied at Sussex and SOAS before completing my DPhil at Oxford.
Research interests
My main interests are in the colonial and post-colonial history of Kenya. I have two forthcoming books that should both be published in 2025. A Man of the World: Tom Mboya, the Cold War and Decolonization in Kenya is a study of Tom Mboya's role in the global politics of Kenya's decolonization. It particularly focuses on Mboya's American network of supporters. The book will be published by Cambridge University Press.
The second forthcoming book, Beyond Federation: Ideas and Practices of East African Regionalism in a National and Global Age, 1950–1975, is co-authored with Emma Hunter (Edinburgh), Ismay Milford (Berlin), and Gerard McCann (York) as the main output of a joint Leverhulme-funded project on East Africa's global 1960s. It will be published by De Gruyter. Our book looks at how the global politics of the period supported a remarkable upsurge in cultural and intellectual practices of regionalism. We examine publishing, the media, higher education and the labour movement to show how ideas of East Africa took hold in this period.
Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya, my first book also published with Cambridge University Press, was a study of loyalism during the Mau Mau rebellion in late-colonial Kenya. My second, Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, published by Yale University Press, was a narrative of post-colonial politics from independence to the introduction of the new constitution in 2010.
I am happy to supervise PhD researchers interested in working on these or related subjects in Kenya, East Africa more widely or in comparison to other regions.
