Pedro Monaville
Ph.D. (University of Michigan, 2013) ; M.A. (European University Institute, 2005); M.A. (Université Catholique de Louvain, 2004); B.A. (Université de Liège, 2002)
Pedro Monaville is a historian of modern Africa. His research focuses on colonial and postcolonial Congo, revolutionary movements, political subjectivities, knowledge production, popular culture, memory work, and the connections between visual arts and history. His first book, Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo was published by Duke University Press in 2022. The book focuses on student activism in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1960s and 1970s. Through their activism and intellectual work, students introduced and mediated new ideas about culture, politics, and the world. In this book, Monaville shows how students reimagined the Congo as a decolonized polity by connecting their country to global discussions about revolution, authenticity, and equality.
Professor Monaville is currently working on three new research projects: a history of the decolonization of the Catholic church in the Congo, a study of knowledge production in postcolonial Africa centered around the trajectory of the late Congolese scholar Tshikala Kayembe Biaya, and a book about Belgian colonialism in the interwar years. He is also the co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: a collection of essays around the work of the Bandes-Dessinées artist Mfumu'Eto and an English translation of Yoka Mudaba Lye's Kinshasa, signes de vie.
Before joining McGill, Pedro Monaville taught at the University of Michigan, Williams College, and New York University Abu Dhabi.
Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo. Theory in Forms Series, Duke University Press, 2022.
“’Love is Stronger in Prison than Outside’: The Intimate Politics of Independence in the Congo,” in Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World, edited by G. Arunima, Patricia Hayes, and Premesh Lalu, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, p.263-290.
“A History of Glory and Dignity: Patrice Lumumba in Historical Imagination and Postcolonial Genealogies,” in Lumumba in the Arts, ed. by Matthias De Groof, Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2020, p.62-77.
“The Political Life of the Dead Lumumba, the Congolese Student Left, and Cold War Histories,” in Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 2019 (89): S15-S39.
“On the Passage of a Few Congolese Through the Situationist International,” in The Other Country/L’Autre Pays, ed. by Vincent Meessen, Brussels and Berlin, Wiels and Sternberg Press, 2018, p.57-66.
“Making a ‘Second Vietnam’: The Congolese Revolution and its Global Connections in the 1960s” in Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties, ed. by Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, Joanna Waley-Cohen, New York, Routledge, 2018, p.106-118.