Esther Ginestet

Esther Ginestet is a historian and a DuBois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. She specializes in East African intellectual history. Her research interests include the history of print culture, literature, gender, ethnicity, land, education, migration, and urbanization in Kenya and in Kampala, Uganda.

Her book project, Communities of Destiny: Historical Imagination and Intellectual Authority along the Northeastern Shores of Lake Victoria, 1850s-1980s, investigates the evolution of storytelling among Luo speakers in western Kenya (“Nyanza” region) from the late precolonial period until the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This project, which is based on her dissertation research, examines how a variety of storytellers—among them erudite grandmothers, male elders, schoolteachers, creative writers, historians, judges and migrants—and their audiences mobilized knowledge about the past both orally and in print to argue over belonging and make sense of the many upheavals that transformed their societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including (and not limited to) the experience of British colonial rule. This research relies primarily on archival research conducted between 2014 and 2024 in over 18 libraries and archival centers in Kenya, Uganda, the UK, and the US.

Esther holds a Ph.D. (dual degree/cotutelle) from Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) and Sciences Po University (Paris, France). Her scholarship has earned various awards and prizes from the Fondation Martine Aublet-Quai Branly, the Fondation des Treilles (Prix Jeune Chercheur), the French Institute of Research in Africa (IFRA Nairobi), and Northwestern’s French Interdisciplinary Group and Program of African Studies.

Esther also used to work as a certified secondary school teacher in the French public education system (professeure certifiée). She has taught history (sometimes alongside geography and civic education) in France and in the US at the high school and college levels. In this capacity, she has developed pedagogical collaborations (around the history of democracy, and the history of empires and science) that enabled students between the ages of 15 and 22 to meet and engage accomplished scholars and public personalities, and to discuss current events in a historical light with these experts. In her free time, she studies Thai boxing and, through this, has become curious about the relationships between intellectual history, social history, and the history of sports in East Africa and elsewhere.