Ethan Sanders

Ethan Sanders is an associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. He received his PhD at the University of Cambridge in global intellectual history with a geographic focus on East Africa and the Indian Ocean World. His current research interests are in African political thought and global black intellectuals, religion and politics in Africa, and the history of inter-religious relations. Dr. Sanders first book, Building the African Nation: The African Association and Pan-Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2025) looks at how early strands of pan-African thought ignited the political imaginations of East African intellectuals and political activists in the colonial and post-colonial periods. His second book project, Julius Nyerere: Africa’s Global Visionary of the Twentieth Century (under contract with Yale University Press) is an intellectual and religious biography of Julius Nyerere explored through a global lens. He has also previously published on the Zanzibar Revolution and the Cold War, James Aggrey and African identity, missionaries and empire in Africa, and gender and ethnicity in Zanzibar.