Benedito Machava

Benedito Machava is Assistant Professor of modern African history. He works at the intersection of social and intellectual history, focusing on questions of decolonization, citizenship, African socialism, and political imaginations. His first book, The Morality of Revolution: Reeducation Camps and the Politics of Punishment in Socialist Mozambique (1974–1990), will be published in fall 2024 by Ohio University Press in the New African Histories Series. The book examines the peculiar nature and role of Mozambique’s carceral regime in the making (and unmaking) of an African socialist experiment. He’s currently writing a new book on decolonization and political imagination in Mozambique. His work has been published in Journal of African History, Journal of Southern African Studies, African Studies Review, and Africa, among others.

He is founder and faculty director of the African Security Program at the Institute of Security Studies, Jackson School of Global Affairs, a promising initiative to think Africa’s security challenges in a volatile world. Before joining Yale, Machava was a Cotsen-Link Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University (2018–2020) and a History Lecturer at University Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo, Mozambique. He earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan.