Pier M. Larson

Professor
African history with specializations in
East/Southern Africa, Madagascar, the
Indian Ocean, and the history of slavery
and the slave trades.

The Johns Hopkins University
Department of History
2850 North Charles Street
Baltimore MD 21218

Telephone: 410-516-5582
E-mail: larson@jhu.edu

Office Hours: Wednesday 1-3 pm
Dell House 1401D

Personal website

Curriculum Vitae

I am an historian of Africa with teaching specializations in east and southern Africa, slavery and the slave trades, and early modern European empire. My specific research concentrations are Madagascar and the western Indian Ocean with an emphasis on cultural and intellectual history in the early modern period, up to about 1850. I am especially interested in language and empire.

I advise graduate students working on all aspects and eras of African history, together with those having broad thematic and regional interests similar to mine. I am especially interested in students who situate their research projects within broad comparative and thematic frameworks.

Ocean of Letters, my most recent book published by Cambridge University Press in 2009, is a study of imperialism, language, and creolization in the largest African diaspora of the Indian Ocean in the early modern period. Ranging from Madagascar to the Mascarenes, the Comores, and South Africa, the work sheds new light on the roles of slavery, emancipation, oceanic travel, Christian missions, and colonial linguistics in the making of Malagasy-language literacy in the islands of the western Indian Ocean. In it, I explore how enslaved and free Malagasy together with certain European colonists and missionaries promoted the Malagasy language, literacy projects and letter writing in the multilingual colonial societies of the region between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Addressing current debates in the history of Africa and the African diaspora, slavery, abolition, creolization and the making of modern African literatures, Ocean of Letters crosses thematic as well as geo-imperial boundaries and brings fresh perspectives to Indian Ocean history. It is primarily based on research in European and Indian Ocean archives.

I am currently involved in two book projects. One is a history of the social uses of literacy in highland Madagascar during the early nineteenth century. It is based primarily on official and private archives in the Malagasy language found in such places as Madagascar, France, England, South Africa, and New Zealand. It is secondarily informed by interviews and oral traditions I have collected in Madagascar over the last few decades. The other project is a broad, synthetic history of French empire in the Indian Ocean up to the French Revolution, based on secondary literature in French and English, and on original research in French-language archives in both Europe and the Indian Ocean.

Recent Publications

Books

• Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic in an African Kingdom (book manuscript in preparation).
• Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Ratsitatanina’s Gift: A Tale of Malagasy Ancestors and Language in Mauritius (Réduit: University of Mauritius Press, 2009).
• History and Memory in the Age of Enslavement: Becoming Merina in Highland Madagascar, 1770-1822 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000).

Articles

• “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora,” Journal of World History 19,4 (2008), 431-464.
• “The Vernacular Life of the Street: Ratsitatanina and Indian Ocean Créolité,” Slavery and Abolition 29,3 (2008), 327-359.
• “Enslaved Malagasy and Le Travail de la Parole at the Pre-Revolutionary Mascarenes,” Journal of African History, 48,3 (2007), 457-479.
• “Malagasy at the Mascarenes: Publishing in a Servile Vernacular before the French Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49,3 (2007), 582-610.
• “Colonies Lost: God, Hunger, and Conflict in Anosy (Madagascar) to 1674,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 27,2 (2007), 345-366.
• “La diaspora malgache aux Mascareignes (XVIII^e et XIX^e siècles): notes sur la démographie et la langue,” Revue Historique de l'Océan Indien No.1 (2005), 143-155.

Recent Courses Taught

Graduate

• Africa and the World
• Colonial Africa
• History of South Africa
• The Indian Ocean
• French Empire in Africa
• Comparative Slavery and Abolition
• Problems in Gender and Empire

Undergraduate

• History of Africa to 1880
• History of Africa since 1880
• The Indian Ocean: Economy, Society Diaspora
• African Fiction as History
• Children and Adversity in Africa
• Slavery, From Africa to America
• Islam in African History

 © The Johns Hopkins University. All rights reserved.