Prof. Dr. Sarah Zimmerman

Sarah Zimmerman’s research examines gendered asymmetries of power and structural dependency affiliated with slavery, colonialism, and their legacies in West Africa, French Empire, and the Atlantic World. As a Heinz Heinen fellow, she will work on her second book, Women Making Memory and History: Slaves, Citizens, and Custodians of World Heritage on Gorée Island. This book tracks the dynamic confluence of gender ideologies, slavery and abolition, French imperialism(s), and heritage production at the intersection of Senegambian and Atlantic worlds. Women Making Memory and History reconstructs Goréen women's history, addresses the multilayered processes and institutions that have produced that history, as well as analyzes the operation of gender in authoritative claims about Gorée’s past and its production—via public history and heritage. Historians have written extensively on Gorée’s eighteenth-century signares—multiracial African female slave owners and entrepreneurs. Goréens from other socioeconomic classes, enslaved women, and the island’s later historical eras have received much less scholarly attention. Via an intersectional approach, Women Making Memory and History will historicize Goréen women from the island’s earliest occupation to the contemporary era, tracking changes in the local production of gendered authority, dependency, and knowledge in step with global transformations of power. 

since 2023
Professor, Department of History at Western Washington University

2018–2023
Associate Professor, Department of History at Western Washington University

2012–2018
Assistant Professor, Department of History at Western Washington University

2011–2012
Lecturer, Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley

2010
Lecturer, Department of History at San Francisco State

2011
PhD in History, University of California, Berkeley 

2005
M.A. in History, University of California, Berkeley 

2002
B.A. in International Studies & French, Ohio University, Athens