Dane Kennedy

Dane Kennedy portrait

Dane Kennedy

Emeritus Faculty


Contact:

Email: Dane Kennedy
Office Phone: (202) 994-6229
801 22nd St NW Washington DC 20052

Dane Kennedy taught courses in British imperial, modern British, and world history before retiring in 2021. He is the author of eight books, the most recent being Mungo Park’s Ghost: The Haunted Hubris of British Explorers in Nineteenth-Century Africa (2024).  Others include The Imperial History Wars: Debating the British Empire (2018), Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (2016), and The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia (2013).  He has also edited or co-edited three others, including How Empire Shaped Us (2016) and Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World (2013). Kennedy was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003-04 and a National Humanities Center Fellowship in 2010-11. He served as director of the National History Center from 2014 to 2020 and president of the North American Conference of British Studies from 2011 to 2013. For the past few years, he has been a contributing member of the annual international seminar, “Historizing the Refugee Experience.”  

Complete C.V. (PDF)


Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History

  • Africa
  • Britain
  • Imperialism and Colonialism

HIST 1011: World History, 1500-Present

HIST 3135: Victorian Britain

HIST 3137: British Empire

HIST 3139: 20th-Century Britain

HIST 6128: Europe and the World, 1500-Present

HIST 6135: British Imperialism

Co-editor (with Antoinette Burton), How Empire Shaped Us. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Editor, Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

The Last Blank Spaces: Exploring Africa and Australia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Decentering Empire: Britain, India, and the Transcolonial World. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006. Co-edited with Durba Ghosh.

The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Britain and Empire, 1880-1945. London: Longman, 2002.

The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. New York: University of California Press, 1996.

Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890-1939. Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1981