Conor Wilkinson

Conor Wilkinson is an interdisciplinary historian of Africa’s Great Lakes Region whose research program incorporates linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival data to reconstruct past human–environment relationships in East and Central Africa over the last several millennia. He completed his PhD in African History at Columbia University in 2025, where his dissertation focused especially on entanglements of humans, plants, and insects between the western basin of Lake Victoria and the Kivu Rift. Today this area encompasses western Tanzania, southern Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DR Congo. At Yale, Conor will develop his first monograph, which centers on historical ecologies of inter-speciated practice among the region’s Bantu-speaking societies and their other-than-human cohabitants. He will also complete a forthcoming book chapter on cattle-keeping and economic thought in Uganda and Tanzania from 500 to 1500 CE, and a forthcoming journal article on territorial spirits and public healing in Buhaya (contemporary northwestern Tanzania). Additional projects he will work on include a reconsideration of the long-term history of beekeeping in Sub-Saharan Africa and a comparative history of mountain dwelling in the Rwenzoris. 

Conor’s past experience includes stints as a sessional faculty member at Huron University College and McMaster University, where he taught undergraduates in a range of African and World History courses. He was also the graduate coordinator of Columbia University’s African History Workshop from 2019 to 2023. His broader research and teaching interests include environmental humanities, comparative agrarian history, ethnobotany and ethnoentomology, and the history of science, especially in global regions that are typically excluded from popular narratives about scientific development.