Michelle Moyd

Michelle Moyd is a historian of eastern Africa who studies the region’s histories of soldiering and warfare. Her first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2014) explores the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa, today’s Tanzania. She is at work on a book entitled Africa, Africans, and the First World War, which examines the spectrum of African experiences in the war, especially as soldiers and workers.  

She is also co-author, with David J. Gramling and Yuliya Komska, of Linguistic Disobedience: Restoring Power to Civic Language (Palgrave, 2018). 

At Michigan State, she teaches courses in African history. She has also previously taught courses on World War I, the history of soldiers and veterans, and histories of humanitarianism. 

She is currently a Red Cedar Distinguished Faculty member at MSU. Before joining the MSU faculty, she was Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University in 2008, and held residential fellowships at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas—Austin and at the International Research Center on Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History in Berlin.