Heidi Gengenbach

Heidi Gengenbach joined the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2013 after over a decade of research, teaching, and consulting in the field of African agricultural, livelihood, and gender history. Her doctoral dissertation, an interdisciplinary study of rural women’s oral and artefactual forms of history-telling in post-civil war Mozambique, received the Gutenberg-e Electronic Book Prize from the American Historical Association, and was published as an e-book by Columbia University Press in 2005. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in African History at SUNY Buffalo, Boston University, Harvard, Brown, and the University of Minnesota. Her consulting work arises from a commitment to approaching African history both as an academic endeavor and as an important source of applied knowledge for Africa’s present development challenges, particularly around food security in post-conflict settings. Most recently, she served as academic partner for a Gates Foundation-funded project with the Global Fund for Women, supporting the sustainable agriculture and food security programming of grassroots women’s groups in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Uganda. In other chapters of her career, she has worked for local nonprofits focused on organic farming, hunger relief, youth mentoring, and legal advocacy for abused and neglected children.

She is currently working on two projects. For one, a collaborative interdisciplinary project funded by a 5-year grant from the National Science Foundation, she will investigate the nutritional consequences of women farmers’ participation in an ongoing donor-funded program to commercialize cassava production in southern Mozambique. The second is a historical book project, under contract with Ohio University Press and tentatively titled Recipes for Disaster: Gender, Hunger, and the Unmaking of an Agrarian Food World in Central Mozambique, 1500-2000.