About Me

I’m Timothy Burke, a professor in the Department of History at Swarthmore College, located just outside of Philadelphia.

My main field of speciality is modern African history, specifically southern Africa, but I have also worked on U.S. popular culture and on computer games more recently. I teach a wide variety of courses at Swarthmore ranging from my survey of African history to the intellectual and cultural history of the idea of the future. I’m the author of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe and the co-author of Saturday Morning Fever: Growing Up With Cartoon Culture. I’m presently struggling to finish a book on individual experience and agency in 20th Century Zimbabwe.

I’ve been writing this weblog since November 2002; you can find the pre-WordPress archives here.

You can reach me at tburke1 @ swarthmore.edu.