Gregory Valdespino

Assistant Professor
Biography

Drop-in hours: Wednesdays, 2 - 5 p.m., or by appointment. 

Personal Website

Gregory Valdespino is a historian specializing in the history of modern Africa and Europe, with a particular in the Francophone world. Trained as a political, social and cultural historian his research explains the changing ways people have defined and accessed their basic needs over the past two centuries. He earned a PhD in History from the University of Chicago and a BA from Stanford University.

He is currently working on his manuscript, "The Politics of Dwelling: Making Home Between France and Senegal in the 20th Century."   This book explains how, over the course of the 20th century, Senegalese urbanites and migrants forged a new set of political demands based on what he calls "the politics of dwelling."  People based these demands less on political or categories like "citizen" and more on a growing expectation that French state had to manage or support their domestic well-being. Rather than end when the empire collapsed, he argues that the colonial politics of dwelling shaped political struggles, physical landscapes, and everyday lives in postcolonial France and Senegal. Alongside this work, he is also beginning a new project on the history of  European foods and African consumers to explain the relationship between food production, industrial agriculture, and sovereignty before and after decolonization.

His work has appeared in The Journal of Urban History and the journal French Colonial History as well as the edited volumes Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities (Intellect Books, 2021) and The Colonial Politics of Population: Fertility, Family and Social Welfare between France and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Committed to public scholarship, he regularly contributes to Jacobin and worked for the history podcast Throughline on their Peabody-winning episode "Afghanistan: The Center of the World."

He has received research support from the Mellon Foundation, the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Education Trust Fellowship, the Princeton Program in African Studies, and the University of Chicago Committee on African Studies.

Professor Valdespino is the recipient of the University of Chicago Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2021).

Publications

Articles

Courses Taught

  • Building African Cities: Past and Present
  • African Urban History
  • Home and Empire: From Little House on the Prairie to Refugee Camps
  • African Migration to Europe in Historical Perspectives
  • The Sacred City: Paris’s Religious Landscape
Research areas
  • African and African Diaspora
  • Europe - Late Modern
Gregory Valdespino
Education
University of Chicago
Contact Information
Address

322 Schaeffer Hall (SH)
Iowa City, IA 52242
United States

Phone Number