CAS MT Seminar Series: Nicki Kindersley, Senior Lecturer in African History, Cardiff University - 'New Sudans: Wartime Intellectual Histories in Khartoum'

Please join us for a talk by Dr Nicki Kindersley.

New Sudans: Wartime intellectual histories in Khartoum
Over a million southern Sudanese people fled to Sudan's capital Khartoum during the wars and famines of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This book is an intellectual history of these war-displaced working people's political organising and critical theory during a long conflict. It explores how these men and women thought through their circumstances, tried to build potential political communities, and imagined possible futures. Based on ten years of research in South Sudan, using personal stories, private archives, songs, poetry, photograph albums, self-written histories, jokes and new handmade textbooks, New Sudans follows its idealists' and pragmatists' variously radical, conservative, and creative projects across two decades on the peripheries of a hostile city. In this seminar, Dr Kindersley will discuss how this project sets out new possibilities in postcolonial intellectual histories of the working class in Africa.

Nicki Kindersley is Senior Lecturer in African History at Cardiff University and a contemporary historian of the Sudans and their borderlands, currently focused on histories of labour and ideas of work. She was an Early Career Fellow with the Independent Social Research Foundation over 2024/25, during which she was a visiting lecturer at the History Department, University of Juba, South Sudan. Her first book New Sudans is a finalist for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize 2025 (African Studies Association). She is also secretary of Cardiff UCU branch.

All are welcome to attend. This event will be followed by an informal drinks reception.