Department/College/UnitSocial Sciences Division

TitleProfessor Emerita

AffiliationFaculty

Other UCSC Campus AffiliationHumanities Division

Additional Location(s)Social Sciences 1

Mail StopSocial Sciences 1 Faculty Services

Biography, Education and TrainingB.S., Ph.D., Michigan State University

Summary of ExpertiseCarolyn Martin Shaw has traveled widely in Africa and has done research in Kenya and Zimbabwe. Her latest work explores the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the construction of colonial cultures in Kenya and focuses on ethnographies, histories, and novels written during and representing the period between the two world wars. Her early research on kinship and social change in Kenya developed into a feminist analysis of gender, ideology, and political economy. The social and cultural construction of sexuality and sexual minorities is also one of her research areas. After completing works started during her Fulbright Fellowship in Zimbabwe, Martin Shaw plans to focus on an African community in the southeastern United States.

Research InterestsTeaching Specialties: African ethnography and African women, social theory, and sexuality.
Area of Research: Political economy, women and gender, colonial discourse.
Area of Fieldwork: Kenya and Zimbabwe.

Selected Publications

• Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
• "Louis Leakey as Ethnographer: On the Southern Kikuyu Before 1903." Canadian Journal of African Studies, 23(3):25-42, 1989.
• "Land and Food, Women and Power: A Re-Analysis of the Contribution of Domestic Activities to the Political Economy of the Nineteenth Century Kikuyu," Africa, 80(4):357-69, 1980.