Paul Bjerk
Contact Information:Email: Paul.Bjerk@ttu.edu
Office: 50 Holden Hall
Fields:
Africa
About Dr. Bjerk:
Paul Bjerk teaches African History, with a particular emphasis on the continuities across the ruptures of the twentieth century. This approach requires deep knowledge of both the endless variety of experience in pre-colonial Africa and their echoes through subsequent changes as well as a sense of the shared experiences created through colonial conquest and rule. His research has focused on modern Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, and his dissertation, "Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanganyika" has been revised and is under review by a number of publishers. Having completed his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008, Paul has a particular interest in helping students understand the analysis and use of oral history, and its interaction with scholarship on myth and memory.
Paul received a Fulbright Fellowship for dissertation research in Tanzania, and has published articles on Tanzania and pre-colonial South Africa in the Journal of Religion in Africa and the Journal of African history among others. He is a regular presenter at conferences of the African Studies Association and the American Historical Association. Prior to joining the University of Wisconsin, Paul taught for three years at Tumaini University in Tanzania as a Lutheran volunteer. There he became fluent in Swahili and participated in publishing a college newspaper with wide community distribution and helped to develop and implement a voters' education project that reached nearly 140,000 people in preparation for the 2000 elections in Tanzania. Paul completed his BA at New York University in 1995, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude, and was awarded membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He completed an MA degree in Latin American Studies at New York University in 1997.