Summer 2026 Fellow

Dr. Ethan R. Sanders is an Associate Professor, and Chair of the Department of History at Regis University, a Jesuit liberal arts college in Denver, Colorado. He completed his doctoral work at the University of Cambridge where he was drawn to the emerging sub-field of global intellectual history, with a geographic focus on Africa and the Indian Ocean World. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the political and religious history of Africa and the Middle East. He has published articles and book chapters on topics such as the Zanzibar Revolution and the Cold War, missionaries and empire in Africa, Christian-Muslim relations in East Africa, African political thought, and gender and ethnicity in Zanzibar. His first book, Building the African Nation: The African Association and Pan-Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2025) looks at the rise of African identity in East Africa and explores the thought of pan-Africanists such as James Aggrey, Paul Sindi Seme, and Julius Nyerere. His second book project, Julius Nyerere: Africa's Global Visionary of the Twentieth Century (under contract with Yale University Press) uses a global lens to produce a religious and intellectual biography of Julius Nyerere, arguably the most important African of the century.
He recently gave a talk on “The Global Legacy of Ujamaa Thought” for the Kansas African Studies Center’s Ujamaa Virtual Colloquium series and is eager to collaborate and work with other scholars of Africa in the Great Plains region.