Assistant Professor
About
Raevin Jimenez is a historian of precolonial southern Africa specializing in comparative historical linguistics and interdisciplinary approaches to the distant past. Her current work seeks to establish a new framework for thinking about gender among South African Nguni-speakers from the 5th-19th century. Her first book project introduces the concept of gendered mutualism, in which common African social imperatives like collective organization in clans and kinship lineages led Nguni-speakers to reckon gendered identities based on the ability to situate oneself among other gendered people, a condition that was not universally available. By focusing on daily speech acts, bodily forms, and relationships across the longue durée, her work recovers concepts of gender that move away from male and female binary conditions and performance to demonstrate how gender emerged in interaction and mutual recognition. In turn, the expectations that mediated gendered identity became central to the ways Nguni-speakers made their lives in the complex space of southeastern Africa. Her research provides a narrative of long-term historical transformation through the ideals and debates of households, and situates 19th and 20th century gender politics in deep-time context.
Before joining the University of Michigan History Department as an assistant professor, Raevin Jimenez was part of the 2018-2020 cohort of LSA Collegiate Fellows. She is among the first one hundred Mexican-American women to receive a PhD in the field of History."
Recent Publications:
"On Transnational and International History," The American Historical Review (March, 2023).
"Food Production, Environment, and Mobility among Late Iron Age Nguni-speakers of South Africa," Quaternary International (February, 2022).
"'Slow Revolution' in Southern Africa," The Journal of African History (August, 2020).
