Wallace Teska

Wallace Teska is a historian of modern Africa. He has published broadly on topics including colonial and Islamic law, religious conversion, migrant labor, and slavery and its afterlives. His first book project, Paths to Justice: Law, Environment, and Social Change in French West Africa, 1800–1960, investigates the entangled legal and environmental history of a forested region spanning present-day Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea from the end of the Atlantic slave trade to independence. He is currently writing a second book, which traces a social and intellectual history of legal reform during and after West Africa’s decolonization.

Teska received his B.A. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University. In 2024, he was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. His research has been supported by Fulbright-Hays, Fulbright-IIE, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Society for Legal History, the West African Research Association, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, among others. Teska’s articles have appeared in several journals, including French Historical Studies, Slavery & Abolition, and The Journal of African History. With Lauren Jarvis and Rachel Petrocelli, he is the editor of a volume, Agency in African History, forthcoming with Ohio University Press.

Teska is also a member of the Senegal Liberations Project (SLP), an international digital humanities collaborative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. The SLP examines the colonial-era “Registers of Liberations”: ledgers that record the names and personal information of nearly 30,000 enslaved Senegambians who sought their freedom between 1857 and 1903. Some of his work with the SLP has appeared in Slavery & Abolition.