Professor Daniel Branch
Professor in African History
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 and currently have two roles: Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor, Africa - a position shared with Professor Franklyn Lisk - and Professor in African History. Between 2021 and 2025 I was Academic Director of the Doctoral College and from 2014 to 2019 I was Head of Department in History. I was also acting Chair of the Faculty of Arts for a short period in 2019.
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. My forthcoming book 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.
Also published in 2025, Beyond Federation: Ideas and Practices of East African Regionalism in a National and Global Age, 1950-1975 (open access copy available for free on the publisher's website), 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 is 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.
