Kathleen Sheldon

Research Scholar since 1989
ksheldon@ucla.edu

Sheldon received her Ph.D. in history from UCLA in 1988 and her M.A. in African Area Studies in 1977. Her books include Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (2002) and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (2005) which was re-released in paperback under the title The A to Z of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (2010). She is an editor on the listserv H-Luso-Africa, which focuses on the Portuguese-speaking countries of Africa.

Her recent publications include “Creating an Archive of Working Women’s Oral Histories in Beira, Mozambique” in Contesting Archives: Finding Women in the Sources (2010), and “Cape Verdean and Mozambican Women’s Literature: Liberating the National and Seizing the Intimate,” with Isabel Fêo P. B. Rodrigues, in African Studies Review 53, 3 (December 2010): 77-99. She has also served as associate editor for the New Encyclopedia of Africa (2007), and as editor for women’s entries for the Dictionary of African Biography (2011). She wrote the article on "Women and African History" (2012) for the African Studies section of Oxford Bibliographies, and also serves on the editorial board for that project.

In addition to her work on African women she recently published “‘No more cookies or cake now, “C’est la guerre”’: An American Nurse in Turkey, 1919 to 1920,” Social Sciences and Missions 23, 1 (2010), based on a diary kept by her great-aunt, Sylvia Thankful Eddy.  

She is currently writing a textbook on sub-Saharan African women’s history from the earliest times up to the present, with a particular emphasis on politics, work, and family, and related issues such as war and peace, markets, queen mothers, and cultural production in literature and the arts.

PUBLICATIONS

Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa (Methuen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 2005)

Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002).

Co-editor with Marissa Moorman, Lusotopie 12, 1-2 (2005), special issue on "“Gendered Social Relationships.”

Editor, Courtyards, Markets, City Streets (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996)  

For a more complete list of publications, please see editor's page at H-Net.