Teaches African history, with special interest in Uganda, South Africa, and ethnicity. Professor Atkinson regularly teaches introductory and upper-level surveys of African history, a graduate seminar on history and ethnicity in Africa, and the gateway course for undergraduate history majors, “The Historian’s Craft.” He has won the Golden Key Faculty Award for the Creative Integration of Research and Undergraduate Teaching; numerous Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Awards; a Mungo teaching award; the Honors College Distinguished Professor Award; and USC’s most prestigious faculty teaching honor, the Michael J. Mungo Distinguished Professor of the Year Award (formerly the AMOCO Outstanding Teaching Award). He has studied, lived, and worked in Kenya and Uganda in East Africa, Ghana in West Africa, and South Africa, and is currently Coordinator of USC’s African Studies Program. His publications have focused primarily on Ugandan history, ethnicity, and educational leadership in South Africa and include The Roots of Ethnicity: The Origins of the Acholi of Uganda.

Current Activities

I am currently working on a book tentatively entitled Being Bagwere: Creating Collective Identity in Eastern Uganda, c. 1725-2000. Based primarily on research conducted as a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow in Uganda, plus additional archival work in England, it examines the long-term evolution of an African ethnicity that spans the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras. I am also investigating the possible long-term historical relationship between very strong El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events and wide-spread drought across sub-Saharan Africa.