Rate My Professor Mahmood Mamdani

Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974. Prior to joining Columbia in 1999, he held faculty positions at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania from 1973 to 1979, Makerere University in Uganda from 1980 to 1993, and 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 in Kampala, where he established an interdisciplinary doctoral program in Social Studies. He was also President of the Council for the Development of Social Research in Africa (CODESRIA) from 1998 to 2002.

Mamdani specializes in the study of African politics and history, exploring the intersections between politics and culture, comparative colonialism since 1452, civil wars and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and the history and theory of human rights. His influential publications include Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Harvard University Press, 2020), Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (2009), Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2004), When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda (2001), and Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton University Press, 1996), which received the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association. His work has been recognized with numerous honors, including listing as 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, the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award in 2011, election as Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2017, and honorary doctorates from the University of Johannesburg and Addis Ababa University in 2010. Neither Settler nor Native was shortlisted for the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and named a World History Finalist in the PROSE Awards in 2021. Mamdani's scholarship has profoundly shaped debates on political identities, decolonization, and postcolonial violence.