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.
- Student advice & feedback hours: Monday 13.30-14.30 & Wednesday 11.00-12.00. Please email me directly if you would like to make an appointment outside of these times.
Academic career
I have been at Warwick since 2008 and currently have two roles. The first is as Deputy Pro-Vice Chancellor, Africa - a position shared with Professor Franklyn Lisk since 2021. You can find out more about our work here.
I am also Professor in African History, having joined the Department of History in 2008.
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.
My teaching
In 2026/27 I am teaching two modules:
HI177 A History of Africa from 1800
Research interests
My main interests are in the colonial and post-colonial history of Kenya. My new book A Man of the World: Tom Mboya, the Cold War and Decolonisation in Kenya is a study of Tom Mboya's role in the global politics of Kenya's decolonisation. It particularly focuses on Mboya's American network of supporters.
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.
