Katherine Bruce-Lockhart

Katherine Bruce-Lockhart is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Waterloo. Her research examines the legacies of colonial coercive institutions. Katherine’s current book manuscript, which is under advance contract with Ohio University Press in the New African Histories Series, illuminates the social history of the Uganda Prisons Service in the postcolonial period. Drawing on a range of archival, oral, visual, and media sources, it explores prison officers’ lives and professional imaginaries while also examining wider questions about the impact of the colonial encounter, the nature of the state after independence, and conceptions of penal modernity. Her previous research looked at the connections between gender, deviancy, and punishment during the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya. 

Katherine is currently working on several additional projects. These include an edited volume on the politics of knowledge production in Uganda, a comparative study of prisons in East Africa, projects on the police and military during Idi Amin’s presidency in Uganda, and a study that explores how prisons were reimagined in the Global South during the process of decolonization. Along with her research, Katherine has also worked on several archival restoration projects in Uganda, a reparations case between Kenyan citizens involved in the Mau Mau Rebellion and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and a report for the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions. 

Katherine’s research both informs and is informed by her teaching. Her pedagogical approach – which is grounded on research-driven teaching and student-centered learning – is shaped by her experiences teaching in Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. She has taught in multiple fields, including World History, African History, African Studies, Histories of Colonialism, Gender History, European History, and Research Methods.

Prior to coming to the University of Waterloo, Katherine was a SSHRC/CHCI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. 

Education: 

• PhD History, University of Cambridge
• MSc. African Studies, University of Oxford 
• BA (Honours) University of Toronto 

Research, Teaching, and Supervision Interests: 

• African History 
• Critical Archive Studies 
• Gender History 
• Histories of law, crime, punishment, and prisons
• The politics of public memory, reconciliation, and reparations
• Social History

Courses Taught: 

• HIST263 – The Age of Revolution: Europe in the 19^th Century  

• HIST391 – The Global History of the Prison 

Selected Awards and Honours

• Alice Wilson Award, Royal Society of Canada
• SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellowship
• Gates Cambridge Scholarship, University of Cambridge
• Clarendon Scholarship, University of Oxford 

Publications

Journal Articles and Book Chapters: 

• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “The Archival Afterlives of Prison Officers in Idi Amin’s Uganda: Writing Social Histories of the Postcolonial State.” History in Africa 45 (2018): 245-274. 
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine and Jonathon L. Earle. “Uganda Studies and Researching Institutional Life in Modern Africa.” History in Africa 45 (2018): 175-191.
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “Reconsidering Women’s Roles in the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, 1952-1960.” In Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies. Edited by Martin Thomas and Gareth Curless, 227-256.London: Bloomsbury, 2017.  
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “The ‘Truth’ about Kenya: Connection and Contestation in the 1956 Kamiti Controversy.” Journal of World History 26:4 (2015): 815-838. 
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “‘Unsound’ minds and broken bodies: the detention of  ‘hardcore’ Mau Mau women at Kamiti and Gitamayu Detention Camps in Kenya, 1954-1960.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8:4 (2014): 590-608.  Reprinted in Politics and Violence in Eastern Africa: The Struggles of Emerging States. Edited by David M. Anderson and Øystein H. Rolandsen. London: Routledge, 2015. Featured: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/how-the-british-treated-hardcore-mau-mau-women

Opinion Pieces & Blog Posts: 

• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “New Perspectives on the Postcolonial Prison.” Humanities at Large Blog. February 2019. 
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “Becoming ‘Amin’s Soldiers.’” Humanities at Large Blog. March 2018. 
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine. “From incitement to self-censorship: the media in the Kenyan elections of 2007 and 2013.” Free Speech Debate. February 14, 2014. 
• Bruce-Lockhart, Katherine.“When does hate speech become dangerous speech? Consider Kenya and Rwanda.” Free Speech Debate. April 26, 2013. 

Collaborative Research: 

• Unlawful Killings in Africa. Collaboration between the Centre for Governance and Human Rights (Cambridge) and UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions. June 2014.