Steven Pierce

I studied political science as an undergraduate at Yale University and then received a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan in 2000. Before coming to Manchester in January 2006, I taught for five years in the history department at Tulane University.

In addition to my position here at Manchester, I am also the Senior Editor for Africa for Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

I am a specialist in sub-Saharan Africa, and my research centers in and around the city of Kano in northern Nigeria, focusing on issues of law, politics, colonialism, social theory, gender, and semiotics.  

My first book, Farmers and the State in Colonial Kano: Land Tenure and the Legal Imagination (Indiana University Press, 2005) is a study of the colonial government of northern Nigeria, looking at the way in which rights in land became the primary idiom for governing small-scale farmers. I spent the 2010-11 academic year as a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During that time I wrote a second book, entitled Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria, which examines the history of discourses of corruption in Nigeria, published by Duke University Press in 2016.  

At the same time, I have been working on a project examining the politics of Islamic criminal law in northern Nigeria, looking specifically at two periods in which it came to national and international attention, through scandals over flogging in the early colonial period and through controversies over homicide cases in the late colonial period.  In the second half of 2013 I was a senior fellow at the Centre for Global Cooperation Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany working on this project.  I am currently completing the final phases of this research with a generous grant from the Harry F. Guggenheim Foundation. This work builds on research I have been conducting in collaboration with Professor Anupama Rao of Barnard College, Columbia University, which resulted in our 2006 book Discipline and the Other Body and a more recent essay in a collection on historical anthropology.

Supervision areas: I welcome inquiries from research students, particularly those interested in the history of sub-Saharan Africa and in historical anthropology.

Current PhD students:

Mr Christian Robinson

Completed PhD students:

Dr Obi Ojimiwe

Dr Thomas Sharp 

Dr Amal al Taleb 

Dr Rey Gonzales

I am an expert in the history and culture of northern Nigeria and have consulted on issues of human rights, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria.

I have provided expert testimony and consultation in immigration cases in the United Kingdom and United States.  Additionally, I have appeared on panel discussions on outlets like BBC Radio 4, as well as providing interviews to agencies such as the BBC, Wall Street Journal, France 24.