Karin Pallaver (PhD in History, Cagliari, 2005) is Associate Professor of African History at the Department of History and Cultures of the University of Bologna, where she teaches Modern African History (BA), African History and Institutions (MA), and Africa and the Indian Ocean (MA).
She is the Rector's Delegate for Cooperation and Development. She has previously worked at the British Museum as a researcher in the comparative and collaborative project "Money in Africa". From 2018 to 2020 she was President of the Association of African Studies in Italy (ASAI).
Her research interests lie in the social and economic history of 19th-century and colonial East Africa. One of the major themes of her research is the monetary history of East Africa. On this topic she has been Principal Investigator of two research projects, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research and by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
She is currently working on two research projects:
- the ERC Consolidator Grant 2021 “Women at work: for a comparative history of African female urban professions (Sudan, Tanzania and Ghana), 1919-1970” (PI Elena Vezzadini, CNRS, Paris), where she is senior staff;
- the PRIN 2022 research project "Arms, Beads and Cloth: African consumers and the 19th-century global economy" (funded by the Ministry of University and Research), where she is Principal investigator (co-investigators: Giacomo Macola, La Sapienza, Rome, and Massimo Zaccaria, University of Pavia).
Her current book project Money in Africa: A History is under contract with Cambridge University Press (New Approaches to African History Series).
Selected publications:
- (ed. by) Monetary transitions. Currencies, Colonialism and African Societies, Palgrave MacMillan, 2022, pp. 309.
- From German East African Rupees to British East African Shillings in Tanganyika: The King and the Kaiser Side by Side, «AFRICAN STUDIES REVIEW», 66: 3 (September 2023), pp. 637–655 (available in full open access)
- “Slaves, porters and plantation workers: shifting patterns of migration in nineteenth and early twentieth-century East Africa”, in Michiel de Haas and Ewout Frankema (eds.) Migration in Africa. Shifting Patterns of Mobility From the 19th to the 21st Century, Routledge, London and New York, 2022: pp. 75-92 (available in open access)
- “From Subsistence Farmers to Guardians of Food-Security and Well-Being: Shifts and Continuities in Female Labor Relations in Tanzania (1800 – 2000)”, in African Economic History, vol. 50, 1, 2022: pp. 67-92
- "A currency muddle: resistance, materialities and the local use of money during the East African rupee crisis (1919-1923), Journal of Eastern African Studies, 13:3, 2019, 546-564.
- (with Jane I. Guyer) "Money and Currency in African History", Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of African History, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018
- "From Venice to East Africa: History, Uses and Meanings of Glass Beads", in K. Hofmeester and B.S. Grewe (eds.) Luxury in Global Perspective: Commodities and Practices, c. 1600-2000, World History Series, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 192-217.
- “The African Native has no Pocket”. Monetary Practices and Currency Transitions in Early Colonial Uganda,” International Journal of African Historical Studies, 48: 3, 2015: 471-499.
- “Population Developments and Labor Relations in Tanzania: Sources, Shifts and Continuities from 1800 to 2000”, History in Africa, 41, 2014, 307-335.
