Biography
Roger S. Levine is a historian of Africa, with research interests in South Africa and comparative environmental history. A graduate of Yale College with a B.A. in African Studies and Environmental Studies and of Yale University with a Ph.D. in African History, Professor Levine teaches introductory classes in African history, environmental history, and southern Africa, and upper-level seminars in African religious history, comparative slavery, African environmental history, and historical methodology and the writing of history.
Levine’s scholarly work seeks to grapple with the historical issues that emerge in colonial situations - particularly in southern Africa - and examines how Africans and other native peoples showed remarkable personal and cultural innovation and resiliency in the face of dramatic economic, social, political, religious, cultural, and environmental change. Levine has published contributions to two major edited collections. “’African Warfare in all its Ferocity’: Changing Military Landscapes and Precolonial and Colonial Conflict in southern Africa,” published in Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Toward and Environmental History of War (2004) looks at the remarkable innovation in military strategy by Xhosa-speakers on the South African frontier in their repeated confrontations with colonial forces during the nineteenth century. This military innovation is contrasted this response to the inability of Zulu-speakers to change their military strategy in the face of overwhelming British firepower, and the chapter seek answers to this dichotomy by drawing on environmental history. The second publication is a study of the diplomatic and evangelical work of an African intermediary named Jan Tzatzoe in the first mission to be established among the Xhosa of South Africa’s eastern Cape frontier.