Nicholas Creary

Department of History and Government

Nicholas M. Creary received his B.A. in History and African Studies from Georgetown University, his M.A. in U.S. history from the Catholic University of America, and his Ph.D. in African history from Michigan State University. He has taught at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Marquette University in Milwaukee, Ohio University in Athens, and the University at Albany (SUNY). His first book, Domesticating a Religious Import: The Jesuits and the Inculturation of the Catholic Church in Zimbabwe, 1879-1980, (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2011), focused on the history of religion in Africa and adaptations of Christianity to African cultures. His second book, African Intellectuals and Decolonization (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012), is an edited collection that examines the roles of intellectuals in the public sphere, the fundamental question of how to decolonize African knowledges, and outlines ways in which intellectual practice can serve to de-link Africa from its global representation as a debased, subordinated, deviant, and inferior entity. His research interests focus on the ways in which Africans and peoples of African descent used elements of their pasts prior to the European military conquest and colonial occupation of the African continent and/or transformed European or hybrid institutions as cultural tools for their struggles to liberate themselves from colonial domination.

Dr. Creary’s current research project, tentatively titled Returning to the Source: Abalobi beSizwe eMzansi (South African Literary Cultural Nationalists), 1918-1945, which is a theoretical reflection on the history and nature of the interactions between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe from 1341 to the present, builds on research that compares literary cultural nationalist movements among Africans and peoples of African descent in the Atlantic world during the first half of the 20th century. He has received several grants, including a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education, and has conducted research on African writers in South Africa, Cape Verde, and Belize.