About

I am a doctoral candidate at Syracuse University studying modern African history. I was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois (a city about ninety miles northwest of Chicago) to a working class family. I had a circuitous route into higher education. My K-12 education was entirely homeschooled. This gave me some real strengths entering college, but also left me with some large and problematic gaps in my education. In the fall of 2010, I enrolled at Rock Valley Community College. I believe to this day that this was one of the best decisions I have made in my life. At Rock Valley I had the fortune to be surrounded by faculty members with the patience and interest to help me overcome and learn what lacked in my K-12 schooling, such as having never done a research paper of any kind and not knowing what a thesis statement was. For the first time in my life I was regularly in a classroom.

My love for this experience led me to excel out of a sheer joy for what I was doing. In the Spring of 2012, I graduate from Rock Valley College with a 4.00GPA and was awarded a transfer scholarship to Northern Illinois University (NIU). At NIU, I continued to relish my time in the classroom as well as the abundance of academically oriented extracurricular activities. I was also highly active in the University Honors Program, pursued a B.A. in history and a minor in Community Leadership and Civic Engagement. I graduated from NIU with a 4.00GPA and was the first Rhodes Scholar finalist in the school’s history. I also decided I wanted to pursue a graduate degree in history with the hopes of some day teaching the history classes that so inspired me.

This first led me to Marquette University where I was awarded full funding as a teaching assistantship to pursue a master’s degree in Global history with an emphasis on Sub-Saharan African history. At Marquette I acted as a teaching assistant first for their Western Civilization survey sequence and then for their African history course. I also took full advantage of all the academic opportunities, which led me to pass my comprehensive exams with distinction, win the Marquette University Prucha-Theoharis Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and win the North American Conference on British Studies International M.A. Essay Prize for my master’s thesis on the 1928-31 Kenyan female circumcision controversy.

My success at Marquette also resulted in Syracuse University offering me an admission to the History PhD Program with the award of the Maxwell fellowship (a two-year fellowship to facilitate student progress and intensive research). While at Syracuse University I have made every effort to take full advantage of the resources available. I have spent extensive time researching abroad in the United Kingdom and Kenya. I have presented my research at numerous academic conferences and won several awards. I have also tried to put down roots in the local community and engage with people outside of the academy through public humanities, including acting as a facilitator for several Humanities New York Reading and Discussion Series programs at area libraries, as well as acting as a judge for the Central New York Region of the National History Day program.

Partially inspired by my own atypical childhood, my research focuses on the role of children and of competing conceptions of childhood in colonial Kenya between African communities and the British, and–on a broader level–my research considers structures of childhood, the role of children as historical agents, coming of age, and questions of cultural authenticity and identity in East Africa. Through interrogating the importance of competing conceptions of childhood during several key moments in Kenya’s history, my research shows how cultural battles over the definition of childhood and the treatment of children were critical in the larger conflict between African communities and the British. In doing so, I hope to provide a critical new dimension in the history of colonial Kenya.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions for me or about material on this site.

-Tom Bouril