PhD Candidate Yannick Etoundi has been invited by the Department of History and Humanities at Wheaton College to teach a course on African history this fall titled Africa and the Modern World.  The conventional history of modernity has largely been written from the vantage point of the West. In response, his course retraces a different narrative that centers Africa as a foundational site for the making of the modern world. Through a thematic and chronological approach, the course will interrogate how the modern era unfolded across the African continent through histories of racial/colonial slavery, European colonialism, transcontinental exchanges, global capitalism, anticolonial struggles, cultural resistance and freedom-making. Etoundi's students will engage in broad theoretical frameworks and closely read scholarly texts, archival documents, photographs, maps, documentaries, and exhibitions. In doing so, they will have the opportunity to think critically about the various characterizations of ‘Africa’ and ‘modern/modernity’, particularly around themes relating to historiography, knowledge production, race and ethnicity, labor, class, gender, material culture, and space. Overall, his course will explore the multidirectional ways that Africa shaped the modern world from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries.