Devin Smart

Africa, Global history, Environmental history, History of climate change, History of capitalism, Labor and working-class history

Teaching Fields

• African history
• European history
• Global history
  
• Environmental history
• History of climate change
• History of capitalism

Degrees 

• PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017

Research Interests

Dr. Smart's research examines the history of the environment and capitalism in modern Africa, focusing especially on food systems and the history of energy. 

His first book, Preparing the Modern Mean: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City, was published in May 2025 with the New African Histories series at Ohio University Press. Drawing on more than 70 oral interviews along with archival sources, the book is an urban history that connects town and country. It examines the experiences of labor migrants who left rural subsistence food systems and then had to find ways to acquire their daily meals within the spatial and commercial dynamics of a city where cash mediated access to daily necessities.  Along with the larger book, research from this project has also appeared in articles published in The Journal of African History and International Labor and Working-Class History.

Dr. Smart has two additional book projects underway, both of which address the relationship between environmental and economic change. Working the Water: Fishing and Extractivism in Twentieth-Century Kenya examines commercial fisheries as a particular kind of extractive industry, considering how these aquatic economies changed the region's lake, river, and marine environments. Smart's third book project, A Refined World: Energy Transitions in Modern East Africa, explores how different forms of energy, such as wood, coal, and petroleum, shaped daily life, the region's environments, and the political economy of colonialism and decolonization.

Dr. Smart has also published articles on the history of tourism and economic development in Kenya in the African Studies Review, and on the politics of racial conflict in late-colonial Mombasa in the Journal of Eastern African Studies. 

Courses Taught

• History 179: World History to 1500
• History 180: World History since 1500
• History 224: History of Climate Change 
• History 209: Twentieth-Century Europe
  
• History 302: Practicing History
• History 321: Colonial Africa and Independence
  
• History 428: East Africa since 1895
• History 484: History Research, Capstone
• History 493: Global History of Capitalism
• History 700: Historiography
• History 725: Readings in African History
• History 726: Seminar in African History
  

Book

Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2025.

Peer-reviewed research articles

"The Reproduction of Urban Capitalism: Street Food and the Working Day in Colonial Mombasa." The Journal of African History. 64, no. 1 (2023): 80-95.

“Provisioning the Posho: Labor Migration and Working-Class Food Systems on the Early Colonial Kenyan Coast.” International Labor and Working-Class History. 98 (2020): 173-192.

“‘Safariland’: Tourism, Development and the Marketing of Kenya in the Post-Colonial World.” African Studies Review. 61, no. 2 (2018): 134-157.

“Developing the Racial City: Conflict, Solidarity and Urban Traders in Late-Colonial Mombasa.” Journal of Eastern African Studies. 11, no. 3 (2017): 425-441.

Book reviews

“Environmental Politics in Contemporary Africa.” Review of The Green State in Africa, by Carl Death. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. Journal of African History. 59, no. 1 (2018):122-124.

Review of Congotay! Congotay! A Global History of Caribbean Food, by Candice Goucher. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2014. Food and Food ways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment. 24, nos. 3-4 (2016): 257-259.