Rhiannon Stephens

Rhiannon Stephens, associate professor at Columbia University, specializes in the history of precolonial East Africa from the late first millennium CE through the nineteenth century. Her research interests include the intersection of gender with social and political organization; popular conceptualizations of poverty and wealth; and cultural and linguistic exchange in multilingual settings. She draws on a range of methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to write longue durée history of oral societies, including comparative historical linguistics, comparative ethnography, analysis of oral traditions and archaeological evidence as well as more conventional archival research. She has published in the Journal of African History and Past and Present.