Joanna T. Tague

Jo Tague is a historian of Sub-Saharan Africa with particular interests in refugee settlement, international humanitarianism, and African liberation movements. Her first monograph, Displaced Mozambicans in Postcolonial Tanzania, examines a wide range of lived experiences—from refugees and asylum seekers to liberation leaders, students, and migrant workers—during Mozambique’s war for independence from Portugal (1964-1974) and their settlement in Tanzania and beyond. Throughout the war, two distinct communities of Mozambicans emerged. While a minority of students and liberation leaders congregated in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, most Mozambicans settled in refugee camps in southern Tanzania. Displaced Mozambicans in Postcolonial Tanzania juxtaposes the experiences of the two groups to showcase the many ways in which the displaced could act as their own agents to strategize their trajectories during exile. The book compels us to reconsider how governments, humanitarian organizations, aid agencies, local citizens, and the displaced themselves defined, debated, and reconstituted what it meant to be a refugee in Africa during decolonization, and it demonstrates how the state of being a refugee could be generative and productive, rather than debilitating and destructive, during this time.

Dr. Tague’s research has been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation (Pre-Tenure Career Enhancement Fellowship); the National History Center (International Seminar on Decolonization funded by the American Historical Association, the Mellon Foundation, the Kluge Center, and the Library of Congress); Fulbright-Hays (GPA in Tanzania); the Denison University Research Foundation (DURF); the U.S. Department of Education (Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships in 2005, 2004, and 2003); and the Summer Cooperative African Language Institute (SCALI).

An advocate of the power of international education, as an undergraduate Dr. Tague studied abroad in Zimbabwe through the School for International Training. After graduating, she joined the Peace Corps and was in one of the first groups to serve in post-apartheid South Africa. Prior to joining the faculty at Denison, she taught courses at the University of California/Davis, California State University/Sacramento, as well as at California State University/Chico.