Ismail Rashid

Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies and Director of Africana Studies Program

Ismail Rashid grew up in Freetown, Sierra Leone and has been teaching at Vassar College since 1998. He received his B.A. Hons in Classics and History from the University of Ghana, M.A in Race Relations from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada and Ph.D in African History from McGill University. His primary teaching interests are precolonial and modern African history, enslavement, resistance and emancipation and African Diaspora and Pan-Africanism. His research interests include subaltern resistance against colonialism and social and military conflicts in contemporary Africa. Mr. Rashid has been teaching at Vassar College since 1998. Among his recent publications are: The Student Radicals, the urban Lumpen Youth and the Origins of 'Revolutionary' Groups in Sierra Leone, 1977-1996 and Smallest Victims; Youngest Killers: Juvenile Combatants in Sierra Leone’s Civil War, (co-authored with Ibrahim Abdullah, in Democracy and Terror: The Sierra Leone Civil War (2003): 66-89 & 238-254; West Africa’s Security Challenges (2004) (co-edited with A. Adebajo), “Class, Caste, and Social Inequality in West African History,” in Emmanuel Akyeampong (ed.), History of West Africa, (2005). He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Resisting Domination in West Africa: Enslaved people, Peasants and Chiefs under Colonialism in Sierra Leone, 1890-1960.