Corrie Decker, PhD

Corrie Decker specializes in the history of gender, childhood and youth, sexuality, and development in Africa. She is the author of The Age of Sex: Custom, Law, and Ritual in Twentieth-Century East Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), which examines how ethnographic stereotypes about rites of passage shaped judicial assessments of girls' and boys' ages in sex crime cases. She also wrote Mobilizing Zanzibari Women: The Struggle for Respectability and Self-Reliance in Colonial East Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and she co-authored with Elisabeth McMahon The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Her work appears in the American Historical Review, Past & Present, the Journal of Women’s History, Africa Today, and other journals and edited volumes.