Christopher Tounsel

Christopher Tounsel is an historian of modern Sudan, specializing in the functions of race and religion as political technologies. He is the author of Chosen Peoples: Christianity and Political Imagination in South Sudan (Duke University Press, 2021) and Bounds of Blackness: African Americans, Sudan, and the Politics of Solidarity (Cornell University Press, 2024). Chosen Peoples, which explores the ways that Southern Sudanese intellectuals used Judeo-Christian Scriptures to frame their revolutionary work against the Sudanese state, was named a Finalist for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora's Outstanding First Book Award and a Finalist for the Christianity Today Book Award (History/Biography). Bounds of Blackness, which unpacks the vacillating approaches that African Americans have taken to the Sudanese state from the late nineteenth-century to the Obama administration, received honorable mention for the International Studies Association Book Award (Diplomatic Studies section).

Professor Tounsel has published several peer-reviewed articles that appear in journals including African Studies Review, Journal of African American History, Journal of Africana Religions, Journal of Eastern African Studies, Journal of Religious History, and Social Sciences and Missions. He serves as an associate editor for Global Black Thought. 

Dr. Tounsel has received funding to support his research from organizations including the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (now Institute for Citizens & Scholars), Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Council of Overseas American Research Centers. In 2012, during South Sudan’s first year of independence, he served on an archival organizing project at the South Sudan National Archive in the national capital, Juba. Working alongside local and foreign scholars and staff, this project organized and preserved materials documenting the new nation’s history.

Professor Tounsel currently serves on the African Studies Association’s Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize committee, sits on the executive board of the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, and directs the University of Washington’s African Studies Program.

As a commentator on Sudanese and South Sudanese affairs, he has provided interviews for outlets including the BBC, Al Jazeera, Human Rights Watch, and NPR's Throughline.