Kenda Mutongi is Professor of Africa History at Williams College. She is the author of MATATU: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received an Honorable Mention from the African Studies Association’s Melville J. Herskovits Award for the best scholarly book on Africa in all disciplines. She has also published articles in the main African studies journals.

Her current project focuses on the history of secondary schooling in Kenya. The study focuses on post-colonial Kenya but also looks back to the turn of the twentieth century when the first schools were established in Kenya. The study will help provide a picture of what it has been like for the students to grow up in a Kenya that is buffeted by all the fears, expectations, and contradictions of a new African nation.

Mutongi has been a Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Amsterdam. She has also received grants from the NEH, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Mutongi has served as chair of the Africana Studies and the Africa/Middle Eastern Studies Programs at Williams, and is on the editorial boards of several journals in African Studies.

She teaches a wide range of courses in the history of 19th and 20th century Africa.

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