Dan Hodgkinson

Dan is an historian of West and Southern Africa whose work explores how past visions of the future have shaped politics, popular culture, and lifeworlds since late-colonial rule. As a transnational and intellectual historian his work investigates issues concerning the nature of oral and film sources and their relationships with public history, violence, and memory. By studying issues of protest, visual culture and youth, his research agenda calls for new approaches for using film in Social Science and Humanities research and teaching.

Dan's work is centred around understanding the history and present-day significance of historic visions of political change. His current Leverhulme-funded Visions of Life project explores the past futures imagined by Anglophone Africa’s first postcolonial film industry, which Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of independent Ghana, set up in the 1960s as a key pillar of in his ambitious project to decolonize his country and the continent. After his removal from office in a coup in 1966, his filmmakers were sacked, and his films destroyed or left to rot. How to investigate a past such as this without the central source? To answer this, Visions of Life takes a novel approach that harnesses the transformative potential of ‘academic films’: creative, critical films that, unlike commercial, educational or artistic films, directly advance scholarly debates. As such, the project uses film as source, method and output within the co-production of an academic film titled The Storytellers. This film is made with Ghana’s first generation of filmmakers and a Ghanaian director, Anita Afonu, and a preview of which is being exihbited at the 35 Ljubljana Biennale.

Dan's other projects investigate different types of political dreams, specifically those of that fire the minds of young people. Visions of a transformed future have animated the actions of many historical actors but perhaps none more so than university students. His forthcoming book, Zimbabwe’s Student Activists: An Oral History from Colonial Rule to the Coup with Cambridge University Press, uncovers why successive generations of students have been at the forefront of the country’s major political episodes and what the legacies of their political visions have been. 

Please note Dr Hodgkinson is not available to supervise doctoral students.