Caitlin Barker
Visiting Assistant Professor
Caitlin Barker
Ph.D.
Contact
Stokes Hall S3
Email: caitlin.barker@bc.edu
Education
- Ph.D. History, Michigan State University
- B.A. Political Science, Kenyon College
Courses
Globalization I
Research Interests
Modern African history; Modern Chinese history; global Cold War history; decolonization;gender; diplomacy
Department
Biography
Caitlin Barker received her PhD in history from Michigan State University in 2025. She is trained in modern African and Chinese history, with a particular interest in the international history of the global Cold War.
Dr. Barker’s current book project, Cold War Cameroonian Diplomats on the World Stage, is a diplomatic history from below of Cameroon’s relationship with China and Taiwan during the Cold War. At the center of the story are the diverse array of Cameroonians who forged and mediated Cameroon’s shifting alliances: nationalists, guerrilla fighters, healthcare workers, and politicians – women and men alike. The manuscript draws on oral history and archival research in Cameroon, China, Taiwan, France, and the UK, to challenge conventional understandings of African international relations as perpetually dominated by foreign powers and their rivalries. Instead, I demonstrate that such narratives understate the experiences and agency of Africans in shaping their own foreign relations.
Prior to Boston College, Dr. Barker was a Brady-Johnson Predoctoral Fellow at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, among other grants. She currently serves as a book review editor for H-Africa and as board secretary for the Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) Research Network. Before beginning her PhD, Dr. Barker taught English and History in Hefei, China for three years and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Adamawa region of Cameroon.
Publications
“Diplomacy of Intimacy: Cameroonian Women’s Anticolonial Diplomacy with China in the Era of Decolonization,” accepted and forthcoming, Journal of African History.
Barker, Caitlin, Ryan Carty, Ajamu Amiri Dillahunt-Holloway, Mircea Lazar, and Nomzamo Portia Ntombela. "Before the Anti-Homosexuality Bill: The Historical Contours of LGBT Organizing in Nigeria." Journal of West African History 9, no. 1 (2023): 111-145.
(Book Review) The Emergence of Global Maoism: China’s Red Evangelism and the Cambodian Communist Movement, 1949-1979, by Matthew Galway, Cold War History, February 2024.
(Book Review) Arise Africa, Roar China. Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth Century, by Yunxiang Gao, Connections: A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists, October, 2022.
(Book Review) The Doctor Who Would Be King, by Guillaume Lachenal, H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews. July, 2022.