Rhiannon Stephens is professor of History at Columbia University. Her research focuses on the long-term history of East Africa, in particular on questions of gender, and social and economic difference. She is the author most recently of Poverty and Wealth in East Africa: A Conceptual History, a history of economic concepts in eastern Uganda over the past two millennia. At the Davis Center, she is working on a project on the intersections of gender, power, and climate on the east African coast from ca. 500 to 1900.