Habtamu Tegegne

Habtamu Tegegne earned his BA (1998) and MA (2003) from Addis Ababa University, where he also held faculty position, and his doctoral degree (2011) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Habtamu has been teaching at Florida Gulf Coast University between 2011 and 2016. He is currently teaching at Rutgers-Newark. His teaching interests are African history, Middle East history and global history. His research has been focused on a critical understanding of the broader historical development of the Ethiopian state, its administration, social dynamics, and agrarian organization. While his temporal and geographical focus remains early modern Ethiopia, Habtamu’s research is informed by comparative perspectives on agrarian societies and a theoretical concern with the nature of property and its myriad intersection with issues of power, labor, class and state.

Habtamu’s work includes Lord, Zèga and Peasant: A Study of Social and Agrarian Relations in Rural East Gojjam (Addis Ababa, 2004). He is also the author of “Rethinking Property and Society in Gondärine Ethiopia,” African Studies Review 52–3 (2009), 89–106. This article is based on his paper that won the 2007 Graduate Student Paper Prize of the African Studies Association. This publication also won the Joseph Ward Swain history prize given for the most outstanding published paper in 2010 by the History Department at the University of Illinois.

Currently, Habtamu is working on a book project provisionally entitled Land, Social Structure and Power in Ethiopia, 1636-1974.  The study is based on extensive archival research in Ethiopian churches and monasteries. Its purpose is an analytical and interpretive history of land tenure and its dynamic interaction with class, social and political structure of Ethiopia from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. By using land registers, surveys, charters, and private property transactions, it seeks to radically revise conventional understanding of the historical social dynamics of the profoundly agrarian society of Ethiopia. Ethiopian ruling classes emerged as true landlords, if not hands-on cultivators, more deeply interested in land and the organization of agricultural production than received wisdom has allowed. The study also uncovered and brought back to life a social class hitherto unrecognized in the literature, zegoch, whose social condition reflects the essential elements of medieval serfdom, but shorn of its more rigid and formalist features. In these contributions his research rewrites several generations of scholarship.