Jeff Schauer is from Shasta County in rural northern California, and arrived at UNLV from the University of California, where he earned a BA in Anthropology and History from Irvine, and a Ph.D. in history from Berkeley. Schauer also studied at King’s College, London, and was a visiting researcher at Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge.

Schauer is an environmental, political, and social historian of colonialism, decolonization, and nationhood in eastern and southern Africa. His research draws on archival work in Britain, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Chronologically, he is most interested in the late-colonial and early-national eras.

Schauer has published work in the African Studies Review discussing how science and administration in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, specifically the management of elephant herds, were affected by decolonization and globalization, and in the Journal of British Studies exploring how the creation of a wildlife management training college in Mweka, Tanzania was deployed by different constituencies in the service of change and continuity amidst decolonization. Schauer’s recent article in the Zambia Social Science Journal investigates the national and neocolonial tensions in arms deals between Britain and Zambia as a way of thinking about how national states sought to accommodate neocoloniality, but to render the structures and relationships associated with it manageable, useful, and impermanent.

Schauer’s book, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), is a history of wildlife conservation in eastern and southern Africa spanning the periods of British colonial rule, decolonization, and the first decades of nationhood. He shows that the colonial era that left a lasting imprint on conservation regimes in Africa was deeply complex, and that although the period began the process of militarizing conservation practice, African colonial subjects also exercised surprising agency in shaping and contesting colonial conservation. The book identifies strong continuities between colonial and national conservation ideas and structures and also argues that international conservation and scientific communities curtailed the abilities of African governments to manage their nations’ wildlife populations and protected areas.

You can find snippets of Schauer’s work elsewhere online, including some musings on wildlife relating to Zambia’s Copperbelt, comparisons with Nevada, and thoughts on conservation and reality tv.

Schauer is currently working on two book projects. One is provisionally titled Theirs from Time Immemorial: Wildlife Conservation and the Making of Northern Rhodesia and Zambia. It continues his interest in environmental history by exploring conservation in Zambia as a fitful and contested state-building enterprise during the colonial and national periods. It examines unintuitive sites of conservation work, explains a shift from narrow wildlife conservation to expansive environmentalism, centers children’s education and ecological thought, explores the political work of customary authority and national leaders, and seeks to revise the significance of decolonization for thinking about conservation. In some ways it is a history of Zambia through the lens of conservation as much as a history of wildlife management in the country.

The second project is tentatively titled A Devil Somewhere in Africa: Security, Nationhood, and Neocolonialism. Its geographic and chronological parameters remain unstable, but it documents how British neocolonialism and its tensions with African nationalism did not merely frustrate governing projects of the latter, but proved constitutive of new and pernicious politics surrounding issues of security, belonging, and state-building.

Schauer is working on a third small project that examines how the Kenyan government and business community dealt with and sought opportunities in the fallout from settler colonialism in southern Africa during the 1960s.

He teaches a variety of undergraduate courses. African history courses include early Africa (HIST 232), Modern Africa (350), apartheid South Africa (103), and topics courses (477B), including on East Africa. European history courses include post-1648 (106), the 20th century (464), and the British Empire (479). And environmental history courses include global environmental history (443) and the Anthropocene (103). He is working on two new courses—one on neoliberalism and social democracy, two forms of political economy and political culture that have defined our times in tension with one another, and another on non-human animals in history.

Schauer has taught graduate courses on various facets of global and southern African colonialism, on the global 20th century, on environmental history, and on historical theory and methods.