Frederick Cooper is Professor of History at New York University and a specialist in the history of Africa, colonization, decolonization, and empire more generally. He is the author of a trilogy of books on labor and society in East Africa and more recently of Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author with with Jane Burbank of Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010). He is currently writing about citizenship in France and French Africa between 1945 and 1960.