Clifton Crais

Clifton Crais, Professor (B.A., University of Maryland, 1982; M.A., Johns Hopkins, 1984; Ph.D., 1988). Over the course of my career my research interests have ranged from African history, inequality, and comparative world history, to biography, creative non-fiction, memory, trauma and narrative. I am author of over one hundred works, including: Poverty, War, and Violence in South Africa (Cambridge 2011); Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, 2008, 2010, Italian translation, Rizzoli, 2011) on the woman more famously known as the “Hottentot Venus,” and the subject of a feature film, Venus Noire; The Politics of Evil: Magic, Power and the Political Imagination in South Africa(Cambridge, 2002, 2009), White Supremacy and Black Resistance in Pre-Industrial South Africa: The Making of the Colonial Order in the Eastern Cape, 1770-1865 (Cambridge, 1992), editor of The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth, 2003), co-editor of Breaking the Chains: Slavery and its Legacy in Nineteenth-Century South Africa (Johannesburg and Bloomington, 1995); and Area Editor of the Encyclopedia of World History, 8 vol. (Oxford University Press, 2008). The South Africa Reader: History, Culture, Politics, edited with Thom McClendon, will be published in 2012 with Duke University Press.

My new work is moving in a number of different directions, engaging with the past expansively and intimately.  I am interested in the nature of memory, experience and historical narrative. History Lessons, a work of creative non-fiction nearing completion, combines memoir, the historical imagination, and the neuroscience of memory. It attempts to think broadly about how we remember, the stories we tell about ourselves and others, and the inner-workings of being a scholar, in a tale of a professional historian in search of his own past. A second direction is to think more broadly about the history of the present through a study of the making of the modern world.