Iman Mohamed: President's Postdoctoral Fellow

The Department of History is pleased to welcome a new President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in fall 2024. Dr. Iman Mohamed just completed both a PhD in history and a JD at Harvard University. She brings an exciting new perspective on the Horn of Africa region to our department, while complementing our current strengths in histories of imperialism and the law.

What brought you to the University of Minnesota?

One of the many things that attracted me to the University of Minnesota was the vibrant intellectual community both inside and outside of the University walls. Many of my now-colleagues have been very influential to my thinking and scholarship in African and Somali studies. Moreover, as someone who studies the history of the Horn of Africa, there’s no better place to engage communities from that region than the Twin Cities.

What are your areas of specialty? How did you become interested in what you study and teach?

My PhD training is in African history and my specialization is in Italian colonialism in Somalia. I came to the topic because there was so little that has been written on this period of Somali history. As a Somali growing up in the post-civil war era, I could sense the influence of Italian colonialism on my community—from loan words to food to our current forms of government—and yet, I could not find much to read about it. In my undergraduate studies at Georgetown University, I did my honors thesis on the immediate post-World War II period, when Italian Somaliland was under British military occupation, and I came to realize that so much of the trajectory of Somali history could not be understood without examining the colonial period that preceded it. Once in graduate school at Harvard, I was really influenced by scholarship in Black studies that helped me rethink some of the prevailing assumptions in my field. Ultimately, I ended up writing my dissertation on the making and meaning of Somali identity (Soomaalinimo) through the colonial period and the ways that race, labor, and anti-colonial nationalism produced new categories of belonging within Somali communities.

What projects are you working on right now?

I am currently working on revising my dissertation into a book. It broadly historicizes the development of Soomaalinimo, or the Somali collective identity, under Italian colonial rule through the lens of labor, law, and race science. In addition, I have two articles underway.

One article is adapted from a chapter of my dissertation on the abolition of slavery in Somalia Italiana in the early twentieth century. It examines how the Italian colonial state grappled with the problem of slavery, which for many years it ignored or even facilitated. Using archival sources, I try to understand what the institution of slavery meant in the socio-economic structure of the pre- and early colonial Benaadir (southern Somalia) and why it was so difficult to abolish. Ultimately, what we find, like in so many other historical contexts, is that emancipation from slavery didn’t necessarily lead to freedom for the formerly enslaved and actually resulted in new forms of labor coercion and discipline.

The second article is about the military tribunal records from Somalia Italiana. It’s an attempt to sketch out what is available in the Italian archives and how it can help us understand the history of native soldiers—who they were, how they were recruited, what their lives were like, what role they played in colonial administration and expansion, etc. This is a rich archive that hasn't really been examined by historians thus far.

What courses do you look forward to teaching? What's special about them?

I look forward to teaching classes in African history, Black intellectual history, and the history of European imperialism. The classes will introduce students to these topics through a variety of methodological approaches, including the analytical skills that historians excel in. Whether you’re a history major, a passionate enthusiast, or simply a little curious about these subjects, there will be something valuable for everyone in these courses.