History Department Faculty

Priya Lal

Associate Professor

Photo of Priya Lal

Priya Lal

Ph.D.

Contact

Stokes Hall S351

Telephone: 617-552-3878

Email: priya.lal@bc.edu

Education

  • B.A., Columbia University
  • Ph.D., New York University

Research Interests

Modern African history (with a focus on East Africa), decolonization and nationalism, development, African socialism, labor and education, neoliberalism

Curriculum Vitae

Department

History

Biography

Priya Lal is a historian of Africa and the modern world. Her research examines听the politics of national听development and approaches to human听development in the twentieth century. Her second book,听Ambition听and Adjustment: The Making听and Unmaking of Postcolonial Development in Africa, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2026. Focusing on the role of academic and medical professionals in leftist nation-building projects in Zambia and Tanzania, it听relates the forgotten history of debates about and experiences of high-level human investment from the 1960s era of African decolonization to the structural adjustment period of the 1990s. In doing so, it reveals the centrality of educated labor to postcolonial development and tells a new story of how neoliberalism displaced modernization and its socialist alternatives on a global stage. To complete this study, Lal was awarded an ACLS Fellowship and a Burkhardt Fellowship, both from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Lal's previous book,听African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World听(Cambridge University Press, 2015), offered the first major historical account of听Tanzania's rural socialist experiment, the听ujamaa听villagization initiative of the 1960s and 70s, detailing how it was envisioned, implemented, and experienced by a variety of actors. It received an Honorable Mention for the African Studies Association's Bethwell Ogot Book Prize and was supported by a research fellowship from the Social Science Research Council.

Lal听is currently writing a book about a global outdoor education movement and听the end of empire, exploring changing ideas about the relationship between selfhood, society, and nature on four continents. In addition, she maintains an active interest in the clinical, conceptual, and political history of neurodiversity. At Boston College, she enjoys teaching about all of the aforementioned topics as well as the history of precolonial Africa and the African diaspora, and the global history of race.

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