Drop-in hours

• Wednesday 10:00 a.m. - Noon and 1:00 - 2:00 p.m., or by appointment

Robert M. Rouphail is a historian of modern Africa and the Indian Ocean World with research interests in the environment, decolonization, and historical connections between Africa and Asia. His research and writing explore how people draw meaning from their encounters with the natural world.  

Rouphail's first book, Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Disaster, Environment, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (Ohio University Press, 2026), uses the specter of the so-called natural disaster—in this case the tropical cyclone—to examine the historical formation of racial and gendered identities in Mauritius, an island off the coast of southeastern Africa. Beginning in the late nineteenth and continuing until the middle of the twentieth century, the book examines how modern Mauritian notions of racial community, gendered labor, and national belonging transformed as a consequence of these storms. Cyclonic Lives shows how cataclysmic environmental events are not only moments of upheaval and uncertainty, but that they are also foundational elements in how we think about ourselves, our history, and our shared future.  His writing on Indian Ocean environmental history has appeared in venues including The Journal of African History, Monsoon: A Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, GeoForum, and Isis, amongst others.

He is currently at work on a second book-length project, tentatively entitled The Ecumenopoli: Urbanism, History, and Ecology in the Afro-Asian World, which aims to write a post-colonial intellectual and environmental history of “the city.” More specifically, it examines the city as an object of concern and analysis amongst a global cohort of urbanists, intellectuals, and activists attempting to reconcile the explosive growth of African and Asian cities in the post-colonial era with an ascendant international political consensus on the need to mitigate ecological degradation.  He is also working on smaller writing projects regarding the development of aviation technology, systems formation, and planetary design in the twentieth century Indian Ocean.

Prior to Iowa, Rouphail was an assistant professor of African History at Susquehanna University. Before that, he earned a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an MA from North Carolina State University, and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He advises doctoral students in the fields of environmental, African, and Indian Ocean History and welcome inquiries from students interested in pursuing graduate work in those fields. 

Awards and service

• 2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Project Development Grant
• 2017-18 Andrew W. Mellon Bio-Humanities Fellowship

Publications

Book

• Cyclonic Lives in an Indian Ocean World: Environment, Disaster, and Identity in Modern Mauritius (2026)

Articles

• “'A Land of Dreams and Nightmares': Race, Afro-Asia, and Decolonization in Mauritius" Monsoon 1.2 (2023): 46–59
• “Women and Cyclone Carol” Vijayalakshmi Teelock, ed. Women in the Making of Mauritian History (2021)
• "Cultural Responses to Tropical Cyclones in Mauritius: From Werewolves to Warning Signs" Geoforum 122 (2022): 56-65
• “The Anthropocene from Below: Nature and Power in Global History”  Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne, eds. World Histories from Below (2022)
• “Disaster in a ‘Plural Society:’ Cyclones, Decolonization, and Modern Afro-Mauritian Identity” The Journal of African History 62.1 (2021): 79-97
• “Cyclonic Ecology: Sugar, Cyclone Science, and the Limits of Empire in Mauritius and the Indian Ocean World, 1870s-1930s” Isis 110.1 (2019)
• “Natural Worlds” Patricia Lorcin, ed. A Cultural History of Western Empires in the Modern Age (2018)