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Frederick Cooper (born October 27, 1947, in New York City) is an American historian who specializes in colonialization, decolonialization, and African history.[1][2] From 1974 to 1982 he was Assistant, then Associate Professor at Harvard University. Becoming Professor of History at the University of Michigan in 1982, he left for a professorship of history at New York University where he has worked since 2002.[3]
In 1969, he received a BA from Stanford University. In 1974, Cooper received his PhD in history from Yale University where he specialized in African history.[4] His PhD dissertation, "Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa in the Nineteenth Century,"[5] was published with Yale University Press in 1977.
Cooper initially studied the history of labor and of labor movements in East Africa, but later moved on to broaden his scope to embrace francophone West Africa as well. Though a firm base in social and polit-economical history is a constant of his works, one characteristic of Cooper's approach to history is a strong concern with epistemological questions and the possibilities and limits of knowledge production, as can best be seen in his articles on globalization and identity, reprinted in his book Colonialism in Question in 2005.
Cooper's research on federalist and confederated proposals to structure relations between the French metropole and its African colonies influenced a new scholarly literature on federalism.[6]
Cooper's contributions to the history of colonialism in Africa and to contemporary African history have been crucial in the fields of African studies and beyond. One of his best known conceptual contributions is the concept of the gatekeeper state that he developed in a number of article contributions in the late 1990s, and in his 2002 book-length essay Africa since 1940. the past of the present.
Cooper made some important impacts on the growing field of global history, not least with Empires in World History co-written with his wife, the historian Jane Burbank, and published in 2010.[7] Moreover, over the course of the last decades, several topical collections of articles by a wide array of international scholars which Cooper edited or co-edited, have had a lasting impact on global historical thought and research directions. These include Struggle for the City (1983), International Development and the Social Sciences (1997), and Tensions of Empire (1997).