The Faculty
Professor David Maxwell
Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History
St Andrew's Street
Cambridge CB2 3AP
Biography:
I studied for my BA in History at Manchester University. This was followed by 3 years teaching in a rural secondary school in Manicaland, Zimbabwe before returning to St Antony’s College, Oxford to take a D. Phil in African History. After a Fellowship in the Social Anthropology Department at Manchester University I was appointed Lecturer in International History at Keele University in 1994. I was made Professor of African History at Keele in 2007 before joining the History Faculty in Cambridge.
I have held Visiting Fellowships/Residencies at the University of Western Australia, Basel University, Switzerland and the Rockefeller Center, Bellagio, Italy. I have also been Honorary Fellow at the University of Zimbabwe; Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa and the Département des Sciences Historiques, University of Lubumbashi, DRC. I have been awarded major reseach grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (x2) and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
Subject groups/Research projects
Research Supervision
I have supervised graduate research on the history of Central and Southern Africa. Topics of students currently or recently supervised include the social history of Malawian labour migrants in Central Africa; the colonial encounter in Katanga, Belgian Congo; the Brethren missionary encounter in Angola; Religious NGOs and development in West Central Africa; Photography in the making of the Congo Free State; Colonial exhibitions on Southern Rhodesia; the History of Charisma in Zimbabwean Pentecostalism; and a comparative study of Shona and Hebrew proverbial Wisdom.
Teaching
My main teaching contributions are:
History Part I: Paper 23 (The West and the Third World);
History Part II: Paper 29 (History of Africa since 1800);
Divinity Part IIB, Paper D2e (Themes in World Christianity);
M.Phil. African Studies Option (Religious Movements and Politics in 19th and 20th Century Africa)
Keywords
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Key Publications
Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A Social History of the Hwesa People c.1870s-1990s (International African Library/Edinburgh University Press, 1999).
(ed.) Christianity and the African Imagination. Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings (E.J.Brill, Leiden [with Ingrid Lawrie] 2002).
African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford, James Currey, 2006)
Other Publications
Select Articles and Chapters:
‘The Spirit and the Scapular: Pentecostal and Catholic Interactions in Northern Nyanga District, Zimbabwe in the 1950s and early 1960s’ in Journal of Southern African Studies, 23 2, 1997.
‘Delivered From the Spirit of Poverty?: Poverty, Pentecostalism and Modernity’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 28, 3, 1998.
‘Historicizing Christian Independency: The Southern African Pentecostal Movement ca 1908 – 1960’, Journal of African History, 39, 2, 1999.
‘"Catch the Cockerel Before Dawn": Pentecostalism and Politics in Post-colonial Zimbabwe’ Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 70, 2, 2000.
‘Sacred History, Social History: Tradition and Text in the Making of a Southern African Transnational Religious Movement’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43, 3, 2001.
‘The Durawall of Faith: Pentecostal Spirituality in Neo-Liberal Zimbabwe’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 35, 1, 2005.
‘Decolonisation’ in Norman Etherington (ed.) Missions and Empire, The Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.285-306.
‘Post-colonial Africa’ in H. McLeod (ed.) The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 9, World Christianities c.1914-c.2000, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp.401-421.
‘Writing the History of African Christianity’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 36, 4, 2006
‘“The Soul of the Luba”: W.F.P. Burton, Missionary Ethnography and Belgian Colonial Science’, History and Anthropology, 19, 4 2008.
‘Photography and the Religious Encounter: Ambiguity and Aesthetics in Missionary Representations of the Luba of South East Belgian Congo’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 53/1 (2011)