Brooks Marmon, a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies has been named the 2021 recipient of the International History Review’s Research Award.

The award, made each May, covers essential travel and subsistence expenses for fieldwork, such as archival visits and/or interviews.  It is funded by the International History Review (IHR), an academic journal that has sought to bridge the study of international relations and historical research since its founding in 1979.  The award facilitates research toward the submission of an article to the IHR.

Marmon’s research focuses on pan-African networks and influences in Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle. He received his PhD from the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh.  His doctoral thesis, “Pan-Africanism Versus Partnership: African Decolonisation and the Realignment of Southern Rhodesian Politics, ca. 1950 – 1963,” examined the impact of wider African decolonisation on the politics of colonial Zimbabwe. 

His work has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, International Journal of African Historical Studies, and in public-facing outlets like History Today and The Washington Post.

Marmon looks forward to using the award to expand the chronological scope of his doctoral fieldwork and acquire documentary and oral material covering Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle in the 1970s.  He anticipates continuing his focus on the ‘second-tier’ liberation movements whose contributions and role during the independence struggle are generally overlooked in Zimbabwe’s historiography as well as that of the region at large.

Marmon plans to use the funds to visit a number of archival repositories across South Africa and, Covid permitting, undertake research throughout the subregion.  

Follow him on Twitter @AfricaInDC.