Jonathan T. Reynolds
Jonathan Reynolds is Regents Professor of History at Northern Kentucky University. He received his BA from the University of Tennessee with majors in Honors History, Anthropology, and Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations, and his PhD in African History at Boston University. At Livingstone College he received the Aggrey Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998. While teaching at NKU he has received the Outstanding Junior Faculty, the Excellence in Sustained Research, and the Milburn Outstanding Professor Awards. Beyond works on Islam in West Africa he (along with cool co author Dr. Erik Gilbert) has published Africa in World History: From Prehistory to the Present and Trading Tastes: Culture and Commodity to 1750. Reynolds is also the author of, Sovereignty and Struggle: Africa in the Era of the Cold War. From 2022-2024 he served as President of the World History Association
Northern Kentucky University
Sessions
Authored by Jonathan T. Reynolds and Erik Gilbert, World in Motion is a core world history text is built around the idea that EVERYTHING MOVES. People (and their Identities), Goods, Ideas, the Environment, and even our understandings of History itself are always in motion. More so, the concept of motion helps to blur and complicate the boundaries that humans so love to create and impose on our understandings of our world and history. Come meet at least one of the authors and see if this is the world history textbook Of Your Dreams!
This panel asks what happens when we the Second World War by foregrounding perspectives that sit at the edges of empire, nation, and historical memory. Together, the papers trace how people far from the well-known narrative epicenters nonetheless experienced the war as an intimate, dislocating, and world-shaping event. One paper examines British efforts to mobilize West African troops for the Burma Campaign, revealing a web of contradictions: African soldiers trained for desert warfare but deployed to jungles; colonial racial hierarchies so rigid that exiled Polish officers were drafted to lead them; and a conflict imagined for the Sahara that unfolded in Southeast Asia. A second paper widens the lens across West Africa, showing how both soldiers and civilians encountered shifting imperial loyalties, coercive mobilization, and new political ideas that unsettled colonial authority. A third paper shifts to rural north China, where locust plagues, famine, and fractured occupation regimes forced communities into parallel wartime struggles largely absent from global narratives. The final microhistory follows three Polish-Jewish-South African brothers whose wartime service shaped their contested positions within apartheid’s racial order. Together, these papers illuminate WWII as a genuinely global war—one lived and interpreted from profoundly liminal and marginalized spaces.