Ned Bertz
Associate Professor
Primary Fields: South Asia, World Comparative / Transnational, Imperialism & Colonialism
Other Fields: Africa, Indian Ocean, Modern South Asia, World History
Office: Sakamaki B409 (On Sabbatical, 2024–2025)
Email: bertz@hawaii.edu | Phone: (808) 956-6766
Accepting new graduate students? Yes
Curriculum Vitae
BA & BS Illinois, 1994; MA, PhD Iowa, 1998, 2008
Background
Professor Bertz specializes in modern South Asian and African history, with a focus on exchanges and entanglements across the Indian Ocean between India and East Africa. Working in Swahili, Hindi, and Gujarati, his first book traces the transoceanic connections of the Indian diaspora in Tanzania through the themes of colonialism, nationalism, race, and urban space. His current research examines the history of decolonization, reframing the dissolution of empire as a longer-term process in which new ideas about territoriality, mobility, and belonging reshaped people’s everyday lives around the western Indian Ocean region.
Courses Offered
Professor Bertz teaches about the history of South Asia, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, in addition to offering courses on world history, global sports history, history and film, history through literature, senior thesis, and historiography. In 2013-14 and Fall 2016, he served as the Resident Director of the UHM Study Abroad Center’s program in India while a Visiting Faculty Member at Ambedkar University, Delhi. In 2010, he was awarded the University of Hawaiʻi Regents Medal for Excellence in Teaching.
Links
Center for South Asian Studies
Undergraduate Certificate in Islamic Studies
Representative Publications
- “The Indian Diaspora in Tanzania,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford University Press, 2021).
- With Shreya Yadav, Ameer Abdalla, and Alexander Mawyer, “King tuna: Indian Ocean Trade, Offshore Fishing, and Coral Reef Resilience in the Maldives Archipelago,” ICES Journal of Marine Science (2019).
- “Sailing Across Antique Seas: Ideas of Historicity in the Writing of Amitav Ghosh,” in Gaurav Desai and John Hawley, eds., Approaches to Teaching the Works of Amitav Ghosh (Modern Language Association, 2019): 46-54.
- “Bollywood in Africa,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press, 2019).
- “Of Shark Meat and Women’s Clothes: African and Indian Encounters in Twentieth-Century Dar es Salaam,” in Scarlett Cornelissen and Yoichi Mine, eds., Migration and Agency in a Globalising World: Afro-Asian Encounters (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018): 143-66.
- Diaspora and Nation in the Indian Ocean: Transnational Histories of Race and Urban Space in Tanzania (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015).
- “Traces of the Past, Fragments for the Future: South-South Cooperation in the Indian Ocean,” in Renu Modi, ed., South-South Cooperation: Africa on the Centre Stage (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 61-72.
- “Indian Ocean World Cinema: Viewing the History of Race, Diaspora, and Nationalism in Urban Tanzania,” special issue on ‘Print Cultures, Nationalisms, and Publics of the Indian Ocean,’ Africa 81 (2011): 68-88.
- “Indian Ocean World Travellers: Moving Models in Multi-Sited Research,” in Helene Basu, ed., Journeys and Dwellings: Indian Ocean Themes in South Asia (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2008): 21-60.
- “Educating the Nation: Race, Diaspora, and Nationalism in the History of Tanzanian Schools,” in Sara Dorman, Daniel Hammett, and Paul Nugent, eds., Making Nations, Creating Strangers: States and Citizenship in Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2007): 161-180.
