Derek R. Peterson is Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor in the History Department and the Department of Afro-American and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He was formerly Director of the African Studies Centre and Fellow of Selwyn College at Cambridge University. His scholarly work is about the intellectual and cultural history of eastern Africa. Peterson is a Fellow of the British Academy; in 2017 he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Peterson has been much involved with Michigan’s African Studies Center, acting at various times as Associate Director, Director pro tempore, and Coordinator of the African Heritage Initiative, a working group that brings humanities scholars in Michigan together with colleagues in Ghana, South Africa and elsewhere.  He is the principal investigator for a $1.5 million grant awarded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation to the U-M African Studies Center and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (South Africa). The program–entitled ‘Rethinking the Humanities in Africa: A Transnational Collaboration‘–is meant to draw students and faculty from Michigan and Wits into collaborative research projects.

With financial support from the Center for Research Libraries and the U-M African Studies Center, Peterson oversees an ongoing effort to organize and preserve endangered government archives in Uganda. The project–which is described elsewhere on this site–is based at Mountains of the Moon University in western Uganda. Over the course of thirteen years seven archival collections have been organised and catalogued, including the papers of Jinja District, Kabale District, Kabarole District, and Hoima District. Several of these archives have been brought into the university’s collections and made available for scholars’ and citizens’ use.

For several years Peterson has worked with colleagues to digitise a very large collection of photographic negatives held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala. That preservation work has created the foundation for two museum exhibitions. The first, entitled ‘The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin: Photographs from the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation’, was curated by Peterson with Nelson Abiti, Richard Vokes, and Edgar Taylor. It opened at the Uganda Museum in Kampala in May 2019; and in 2020 the exhibition traveled to regional venues in Soroti and Arua. The second exhibition, titled Uganda at 60: An Exhibition of National History, was opened by Yoweri Museveni, President of the Republic of Uganda, at the Uganda Museum in October 2022. It featured an assortment of photographs and archival documents that together illuminated the vexing logic of Uganda’s independence. Further information on these exhibitions can be found elsewhere on this site.