Congratulations to Professor Peter Mitchell, Tutorial Fellow in Archaeology, for being co-editor of The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources, which has just been awarded the Waldo G. Leland Prize by the American Historical Association (AHA) for the best reference work published over the past five years. The book, which is part of the larger online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, is the first comprehensive collection of the methods and sources that scholars use to explore African history. It discusses the different genres of history that African historians write and why they write them, and includes over 75 in-depth articles giving extensive overviews of themes in African historiography, including one by former St Hugh’s Human Sciences Tutor, Professor Cristian Capelli.
The American Historical Association is the largest professional organization for historians in all fields and advocates for history education, the professional work of historians, and the critical role of historical thinking in public life.
Professor Mitchell’s own research focuses on African archaeology, especially that of past hunter-gatherer populations in southern Africa, but he has also written widely on the continent’s pre-colonial past as a whole and on the relations between people and animals. A new book, African Islands: A Comparative Archaeology, is currently in press.
