Derek R. Peterson

Derek R. Peterson is Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor in the History Department and the Department of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He was formerly Director of the African Studies Centre and Fellow of Selwyn College at Cambridge University. His scholarly work is about the intellectual and cultural history of eastern Africa. 

His first book, Creative Writing (2004), concerned the history of Gikuyu-language literature in central Kenya. More recently Peterson’s work has shifted largely to Uganda. His second book, Ethnic Patriotism and the East African Revival (2012), was a study of a Christian conversion movement that provoked eastern Africa’s patriotic community-builders. The book was awarded the African Studies Association’s Herskovits Prize and the American Historical Association’s Martin Klein Prize. His most recent book is A Popular History of Idi Amin's Uganda, published in 2025 by Yale University Press. 

Peterson was made a MacArthur Fellow in 2017, and has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. He has edited books on a range of subjects: on government photography in Idi Amin’s Uganda; on the politics of British slave abolition; on the populist enterprise of history-writing in colonial Africa; and on the heritage industry in Africa. Peterson edits (with Carina Ray and Jacob Dlamini) the New African Histories book series for Ohio University Press, and serves on the editorial board of several journals.

With support from the Center for Research Libraries and the U-M African Studies Center, Peterson coordinates an ongoing effort to organize and preserve endangered government archives in Uganda. The project is based at Mountains of the Moon University in Fort Portal; several local government archives have been retrieved, brought into the university’s collections, and made available for scholars’ and citizens’ use.