James M. Burns
Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998
Associate Professor
120 Hardin Hall
(864) 656-5359
burnsj@clemson.edu
www.clemson.edu/~burnsj

Professor Burns, the 2005 winner of the Gentry Award for outstandin teaching, has came to Clemson in 1999. He is a specialist in African history, though he also teaches courses in Film and History, Historical Methods, and Western Civilization. Dr. Burns’s first book, Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe, a study of how European leaders used film as an imperial tool and how colonial Africans resisted in unexpected and surprising ways, was named by Choice magazine as one of its Outstanding Academic Titles for 2002. He is the co-author with Robert O. Collins of A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.  He is currently working on a book about the early history of the cinema throughout the African Diaspora.

For Dr. Burns’s course syllabi, curriculum vitae, and other useful resources, please visit his webpage at http://www.clemson.edu/~burnsj/.

Selected Publications

A History of Sub-Saharan Africa (with Robert O. Collins, 2007).

"The Cinema in Zimbabwe" in Cinemaction (Paris, forthcoming)

"A Source of Innocent Merriment: Cinema and Society in Colonial Zimbabwe" South African Historical Journal (Forthcoming)

"John Wayne on the Zambezi: Cinema, Empire, and the American Western in British Central Africa" International Journal of African Historical Studies (2002)

Flickering Shadows: Cinema and Identity in Colonial Zimbabwe (2002)

"Biopics and Politics: The Making and Unmaking of the Rhodes Films" Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal (Winter 2000)

"Watching Africans Watch Movies: Theories of Spectatorship in British Colonial Africa,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television (June 2000)

Co-editor, Problems in Modern African Studies (1997)

Co-editor, Historical Problems of Imperial Africa (1994)

Co-editor, Problems in African History ( 1992)

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