Jeanne Marie Penvenne is an historian of colonial era Mozambique. Her work includes urban and labor history, African intellectual history, oralcy, and gender in Southern Africa. Her books, African Workers and Colonial Racism; Mozambican Strategies for Survival in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique 1877-1962 and Women, Migration & the Cashew Economy in Southern Mozambique, 1945-1975 were both finalists for the African Studies Association and African Studies Women’s Caucus best book prizes, the Herskovits Award and Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, respectively. Her books, articles and chapters in edited collections have been translated into French and Portuguese.
She served on the editorial advisory boards of The Journal of African History and The International Journal of African Historical Studies, and was an inaugural member of the research editorial board of Lusotopie: Enjeaux Contemporains dan les Espaces Lusophones. Her international research won support from the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright Regional Research Program, Fulbright Hayes, Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Troy Foundation and Gulbenkian Foundation.
She is Professor Emerita in the College of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. From 1994 to 2018 she was core faculty in History, International Relations, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Africana Studies. She holds all three Tufts University Awards for Outstanding Teaching and Advising in the Arts & Sciences. She has held a Research Appointment in African Studies at Boston University since the 1980s, and was a Visiting Professor of History at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique in 1977, 1992-92 and 2004-05.
At Tufts she founded the Senior Honors Thesis Exchange, the Tufts Africa Forum and co-founding the International Research Colloquium to encourage undergraduates to explore research across Tufts’ schools and research institutes, and while studying abroad. These initiatives served students in History, Political Science, and International Relations, but also provided student opportunities across Arts and Sciences.
Penvenne was elected to the Faculty Executive Committee and was a founding member of Tufts Task Force on Work / Life Issues and the Task Force on Research Abroad. These task forces were initiated by Provost Jamshed Bharucha to build synergies, incorporate best practices, and enhance transparency among Tufts schools, institutes and programs.
Personal Statement:
My work focuses on Southern Mozambique, its colonial capital city Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), My books draw out the lives of ordinary Mozambican people who are ignored in the archival record, and often simply enumerated in printed materials. Oral history and the gendered nature of memory and narrative are of particular interest. My journal articles and book chapters develop the lives of the city’s intellectual elite, their families and struggles, as revealed through the window of Mozambique’s colonial era newspapers, published in Portuguese and XiRonga. Oral histories frequently disrupt and belie received and archival narratives. I deposited all my oral history recordings in Mozambique’s national archive and African Studies Center so that future generations of Mozambican historians can bring their questions and insights to the material. My current work surveys Mozambique’s labor history, contextualizing it within Southern Africa and the former Portuguese Empire. I am also interested in the many ways contemporary Mozambican fiction and oral histories intersect.
Jeanne is a long-time personal friend and was a staunch ally of the Institute for Global Leadership.
In the decades I taught, mentored and programmed at Tufts, she was among the most assiduous, caring of Tufts professors, who unstintingly gave of her time and effort on behalf of her students. A noted fastidious researcher, she imparted this exacting and rigorous quality to her advisees.
Professor David Guston, myself, and Duncan
And she cared about people. I remember well one occasion when one of our wonderful common students, Duncan Pickard, was advised to abandon his senior honors thesis because his core advisor , Felipe Fernández-Armesto had left the University for a prestigious post in Madrid . Jeanne salvaged the situation by organizing the thesis defense through the Fletcher School’s international telecommunications facility in April 2010. And she gave us all handmade ties.
She was unfailingly scrupulous in her conduct and expectation of others. She suffered no fools, and magnificently, and at times courageously, led with a manner that I can best describe as "quiet steel." Jeanne always conducted herself with reserved dignity.
It was her criticism that I always took to heart. It was always meant to improve.
We shared a love and admiration of our colleague, priceless Gerald Gill, who Jeanne ensured was well remembered by their department, and Tufts as a whole.
It is my belief that Jeanne was among the most admired faculty at our University, and for very good reason.