Adjunct Professor of History
B.A., M.A. (Trent University), Ph.D. (York University)
Katrina Keefer is an Adjunct Professor at Trent University. She is a cultural historian who specializes in identity, body marking, slavery, and initiatory societies in West Africa as well as representation of the Global South in games. Keefer's most recent research revolves around the democratization of knowledge, developing better tools to comprehensively trace identities through archival records, and data visualization through media such as games and web-based pedagogic tools. Keefer was initially trained as a classicist, and her subsequent research often engages with a contextualized approach to cultural history. Her first book, Children, Education and Empire in Early Sierra Leone: Left in Our Hands, was published by Routledge's Global Africa series in summer 2018 and her second book, "Cannibalism Myths, Empire, and Identity in Colonial Sierra Leone" is being released by Lexington Books in fall 2024 and has already received strong endorsements by her colleagues. It closely examines a series of cannibalism trials held in the early twentieth century in Sierra Leone purportedly to put an end to shapeshifting 'human leopards' and her work demonstrates the complex meanings and nuances which revolved around these cases.
Keefer has held multiple SSHRC Insight Development and Insight Grants pertaining to her digital humanities work and her latest grant revolves around how to capture and curate embodied knowledge in ways which explicitly centre anticolonial approaches and community coauthorship.
Current Interests
Cultural history; body marking; Identity; African history; Classical history; Intellectual history; the history of slavery globally; missionary education and development; representation within games.
Publications
Her work has been published in History in Africa, Games & Culture, the Journal of West African History, the African Studies Review, and the Canadian Journal of African Studies. She has been invited to publish chapters in numerous edited volumes around topics of games, representation, community collaboration, African history, colonialism, and identity.
