David Glovsky
David (Dave) Glovsky is a historian of 19th and 20th century West Africa, with a focus on Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and the Gambia. His research and teaching interests include histories of mobility and migration, borderlands, spatial history, Islam, citizenship, and histories of popular culture/sport. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a variety of topics in African History and African Studies, with an eye to understanding the global dimensions and connections of African societies and peoples, both in the past and present. His research, teaching, and service is animated by a focus on social justice and equity, and in broadening historical perspectives to include oppressed and underrepresented communities. He welcomes inquiries from scholars, current/potential graduate students, and others interested in related questions/geographies, and is currently accepting graduate students.
Professor Glovsky’s current book project, Borderlanders: Popular Geographies, Mobility, and Belonging in West Africa, examines the durability and adaptation of popular, fluid geographies in West Africa, grounded in borderland conceptions of space and place. Based on oral histories and archival research, this study argues that borderland residents in four colonies/states—Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea—used fluid ideas of boundaries, citizenship, and community to build durable, cross-border networks. Using a variety of strategies tied to mobility, communities produced and reproduced their own territorial spaces, forged in the aftermath of colonial partition. These popular geographies (as opposed to relatively unpopular state geographies) allowed West Africans to create a multinational space characterized by mobility, fluidity, and connectivity, selectively engaging with the official spaces of bordered nation-states. This project was awarded an ACLS Fellowship.
He has also begun work on a second book, tentatively titled, Sacrificial Citizenship: National Belonging in West Africa after Decolonization. This work uses the cases of Guinea’s socialist modernization project and Guinea-Bissau’s struggle for independence, contrasted with the more stable political situation in Senegal, to demonstrate the contested nature of ideas of belonging and national identity across late colonial and postcolonial Africa. In Guinea, roughly 30 percent of people left the country by the early 1980s, and in Guinea-Bissau, that number was around 20 percent. Drawing on oral histories, governmental reports, and newspapers, he will argue that mobility played a key role in showing the limits and fractures of postcolonial belonging. While some people supported and were willing to sacrifice for the emerging nation-state and its national project, many others chose to opt out or flee the country entirely. Through a comparative analysis of Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Senegal, this project looks at how postcolonial citizens engaged with, ignored, or disregarded governmental ideas of belonging and national sacrifice to better understand how people understood their place in the nation following independence.
Professor Glovsky was previously involved in the BU African Studies Center’s NEH ‘Ajamī Project, selecting Pulaar manuscripts in Arabic script (‘Ajami) and digitizing, transliterating, and translating them into French and English for online and print publication. He has also done other work to publicize and broaden the accessibility of African history, both in the U.S. and greater Senegambia.
Before becoming an academic, Professor Glovsky worked in a variety of fields, including a stint doing live statistics for college football and basketball at ESPN, three years as a college hockey broadcaster and sports columnist, and in K-12 education. His interest in African History developed after spending two years in southern Senegal as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the town of Dabo. His experience living and working in Fulbe/Fulani communities throughout southern Senegal inspired him to return to academic life and explore the historical context of the area where he had lived. As a result, he believes that intellectual expertise comes from a variety of lived perspectives and experiences, not just from within the classroom.
Professor Glovsky holds a B.A. in History and Human Geography from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in African History from Michigan State University. Prior to coming to Harvard, he taught in the Department of Africana Studies at the University at Albany, State University of New York, and the Department of History at Boston University. He was born and raised in eastern Massachusetts and is grateful to be back in the area, especially as a lifelong fan of Boston sports teams.
Select Publications (please email me if you don’t have access):
“The Fuuta Jalon ʿAjamī Tradition,” with Abubakar Jalloh, Islamic Africa 14:2 (2023), pp. 178-198.
“Cross-Border Lives and the Complications of Postcolonial Citizenship: Migration, Belonging, and Alternative Geographies in the Borderlands of Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Senegal, 1958–1980,” Journal of West African History 9:1 (2023), pp. 57-83.
“Fulbe Collaboration, Survival, and Flight: Lived Experiences of Guinea-Bissau’s War for Independence, 1963-1974,”Journal of African History 63:2 (2022), pp. 214-230.
“Medina Gounass: Constructing Extra-National Space in a West African Borderland,” African Studies Review 64:3 (2021), pp. 569-594.