Rate My Professor Christine Saidi

Dr. Christine Saidi serves as a Professor in the Department of History at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, where she specializes in African History within the areas of Society, History, and Culture. She obtained her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles, inspired by a course on early South African history taught by Dr. Christopher Ehret. Throughout her career, Dr. Saidi has taught a variety of courses including HIS 014 World Civilizations A, HIS 015 World Civilizations B, HIS 204 History of Gender Dynamics in Africa, HIS 231 History of Africa to 1800, HIS 261 History of Africa since 1800, HIS 262 History of Africans in the Americas, and selected topics such as the History of the Crusades Through Another Lens. Her international experience includes serving as an Exchange Professor at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2010, and living in countries such as Zambia, South Korea, and Italy.

Dr. Saidi's research centers on gender, authority, identity, and matrilineality in early East-Central African history. Notable publications include Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (University of Rochester Press, 2010); Bantu Africa (Oxford University Press, 2017, co-authored with R. Gonzales and C. Fourshey); "Gender, Authority, and Identity in African History" in The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies (Palgrave, 2019); "Women in Precolonial Africa" in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford University Press, 2020); and forthcoming Beyond Gender in Early African History (Cambridge University Press, with R. Gonzales and C. Fourshey). She has secured significant grants, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative grant for "Expressions and Transformations of Gender, Family, and Status in Eastern and Central Africa, 500-1800 CE" (2016-2019), an NEH Summer Seminar on Development Ethics (2015), and a 2021 Pennsylvania Open Education Resources grant for the "Ufahamu" Africana resource database. Dr. Saidi received the 2024 Chambliss Faculty Research Award, the 2025 Faculty Mentorship Award, and will host the Fall 2025 Chambliss Faculty Lecture. Her work contributes to understanding non-binary gender roles and women's authority in precolonial Africa.