Niels Boender

Biography

I am a scholar of African global history, with a specialisation in the political and intellectual history of East African decolonisation. My first book, Afterlives of Mau Mau: Decolonisation and the Politics of Reconcilliation is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

I continue to be part of the AHRC-funded GLOSOC project, with Professor Emma Hunter at Edinburgh and Dr Julia Moses at Sheffield. We are collectively looking at the global history of socio-economic rights in relation to work in the period after the Second World War. Before coming to Edinburgh, I completed my doctorate at the University of Warwick on the legacies of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, especially as it related to the politics of reconciliation.

I have also worked with the Imperial War Museum on their 2025-2026 Empire and Conflict exhibit.

Research and scholarship

My research examines the social, political, and cultural afterlives of decolonisation in East Africa, with a particular focus on Kenya. My doctoral work, completed at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Daniel Branch and David Anderson, traced the local politics of post-war reconciliation in Central Kenya between 1956 and 1969, foregrounding the ways radicalised ex-insurgents continued to articulate alternative visions of independence after the Mau Mau Emergency. This research is now being developed into a monograph, Afterlives of Mau Mau: Decolonisation and the Politics of Reconciliation in Kenya, under contract with Cambridge University Press, and has produced a substantial body of peer-reviewed work in venues including the Journal of African History, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, the Journal of Social History, and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Alongside this, I have pursued a public-facing strand of this research through a collaborative doctoral partnership with the Imperial War Museum, where I contributed to the Emergency Exits exhibition on decolonisation in Kenya, Malaysia, and Cyprus, and through involvement in the Channel 4/Al Jazeera documentary A Very British Way of Torture, which drew on the Migrated Archive.

My current research extends this interest in East Africa's social and political history in two directions. As an AHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh, working with Julia Moses and Emma Hunter, I was until recently investigating how global discourses of socio-economic rights took on domestic meaning in Kenya and Tanzania across the late-colonial and early post-colonial periods, combining archival research with elite and grassroots oral history and a digital humanities component built around a virtual exhibition and policy engagement with governments and charities such as WOTESAWA (who work on domestic workers rights). In parallel, I am developing a critical edition of Robert Kakembo's An African Soldier Speaks, supported by grants from the Royal Historical Society and the British Institute in Eastern Africa, and I continue to write on themes of labour, reconciliation, and colonial legacy for outlets ranging from History Today to Africa is a Country.

Teaching

• HIS - 10050 History in Media and Film: The Presentation of the Past in Contemporary Culture
• HIS - 20137 Colonial Legacies: the inconvenient histories of individuals, families, and communities since 1800
• Global Challenge Pathway - Digital Society

Collaborations and grants awards

• Royal Historical Society, Early Career Research Support Grant, 2026 (1000 GBP) for research on a book project entitled An African Soldier Speaks: Robert Kakembo and the African Experience of the Second War.
• British Institute in Eastern Africa, Thematic Grant, 2026 (1000 GBP) for research on the African Soldier Speaks book project.
• University of Warwick, Chancellor’s International Scholarship, 2021-2024 (55,040 GBP).
• Imperial War Museum & Arts and Humanities Research Council, Collaborative Doctoral Award, 2020-2024 (24,628 GBP).
• University of Cambridge, Cambridge Trust European Scholarship, 2019-2020 (10,000 GBP).