George Njung, Ph.D.

Dr. George Njung is an Assistant Professor of African history at the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core Program and at the Department of History. His research and teaching geographically straddles West and Central Anglophone and Francophone Africa. Thematically, he focuses on gendered and transnational histories of the First World War in Africa, colonialism, colonial gendered and sexual violence, war disability, and historical approaches to African migrant and refugee experiences. He is also interested in historical approaches to African development problems, the crisis of leadership and governance, social justice, and the varying micro and macro relationships and partnerships between Africa and the global north.

For the courses that he offers at BIC’s World Cultures I, IV, and V and in African and World histories, he tends to focus predominantly on transnational, comparative, and gendered approaches to the teaching and learning of history. His emphasis on the role of women and gender in history hinges on the conviction that employing women and gender as a teaching frame is materially consequential to students’ world views and abilities to excel in a challenging and complex world.  

His first book, A Gendered History of the First World War in Africa (Ohio University Press 2023) counters the more than one century of androcentric scholarship of the war to delineate how all genders (men and women) experienced the war in West Africa (Cameroon) as participants, food provisioners, collaborators, resisters, agents, victims, soldiers, and civilians. It recasts the global human experience of the war by remaining attentive to its gender, transnational, and global contours. His second book, Amputated Men: A Comparative Study of the Struggles of disabled WW1 ex-servicemen in British and French West Africa, will examine how the war reshaped gender identities in British and French West Africa and the differential treatment by the colonial governments of their war disabled. Among his several collaborative research works is a project that combines a historical and epidemiological perspective on the impact of the 1983 famine in Ghana on motherhood and childhood. He was most recently commissioned by the Cambridge University Press to contribute a book chapter titled “War and Peace” in the New Cambridge History of Britain, Vol. IV, to be in print in 2025.

Before joining Baylor in the fall of 2022, Dr. Njung had taught previously at Washington State University in 2017. From 2018 to 2022, he was senior lecturer in history at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa where he taught, advised, and mentored undergraduate and graduate students, including four honors, one MA, and four doctoral students who came from Canada (of Cameroonian origin), Nigeria, Ghana, and Malawi. While at Wits, he provided services to the university, including serving as the postgraduate admissions coordinator for History.

Education 

2016   Ph.D. in History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor-MI

2014   Graduate Certificate in African Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor-MI

2000   M.A. in History, University of Buea, Buea-Cameroon

1998   B.A. in History & Archaeological Sciences, University of Buea, Buea-Cameroon       

Selected publications as of August 2022

‘Playing Politics: A history of the Biafran child-refugee in Gabon and Cȏte d’Ivoire during the Nigerian Civil War, 1967-1970.’ Africa Today 69: 1 & 2 (Fall 2022).

‘Rethinking Refuge: Processes of Refuge Seeking – Special Issue Introduction.” Africa Today 69:1 & 2 (Fall 2022). With Marcia Schenck. 

‘Using legislation as a primary source to study political and electoral aspects of South Africa’s history in the 1960s.’ In Gale Researcher Guide. Marlborough: Adam Mathew Digital, 2022.

‘Refugee exchanges between Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea and their Socio-economic relevance, from the First World War to immediate post-independence.’ Canadian Journal of African Studies 55:3 (Fall 2021): 453-474.

‘Using posters for researching women’s struggles against apartheid in South Africa.’ In Research Methods Primary Sources. Marlborough: Adam Mathew Digital, 2021.

‘Amputated men, colonial bureaucracy, and masculinity in post-World War I colonial Nigeria.’ Journal of Social History 53:3 (Spring 2020): 620-643.

‘The British Cameroons Mandate Regime: The roots of the twenty-first-century political crisis in Cameroon.’ American Historical Review 124:5 (December 2019):1715-1722.

‘Victims of empire: WWI ex-servicemen and the colonial economy of wartime sacrifices in postwar British Nigeria.’ First World War Studies 10:1 (2019): 49-67.

Forthcoming

Violent encounters: A gendered history of the First World War in West Africa (Cameroon). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2023.  

Africa and the global north: Entangled histories, relations, and issues of development (With Ruth Murambadoro & Roland Ngam). 2023.

Amputated men: A comparative study of the struggles of disabled WW1 soldiers in British and French West Africa. 2025.

‘War and peace.’ In The new Cambridge history of Britain, Vol. IV, edited by Lara Kriegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.