Rate My Professor Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a professor of political science and anthropology at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 1974, a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1967, and M.A. degrees in political science and law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University in 1968 and 1969. His distinguished career spans several institutions: he taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania from 1973 to 1979, at Makerere University in Uganda from 1980 to 1993, and at the University of Cape Town from 1996 to 1999. From 2010 to 2022, he served as professor and executive director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research, where he established an interdisciplinary doctoral program in social studies. Additionally, he was president of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from 1998 to 2002.

Mamdani's research specializations encompass African and international politics, colonialism and post-colonialism, the politics of knowledge production, civil wars and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, human rights, and the intersection between politics and culture. His seminal publications include Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (1996), which received the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association; When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (2001); Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004); Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2009); Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (2012); and Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (2020), shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and as a World History Finalist in the PROSE Awards. He has been named one of the top 20 public intellectuals by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines in 2008 and among the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect Magazine in 2021. Mamdani teaches courses on major debates in African studies, the modern state and the colonial subject, the Cold War and the Third World, the theory, history, and practice of human rights, and civil wars and the state in Africa. His essays have appeared in the New Left Review and the London Review of Books.