Samuel Fury Childs Daly
Associate Professor
Department of History and the College
Samuel Fury Childs Daly is a historian of law in 20th-century Africa. His first book, A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020), connected the crisis conditions of the Nigerian civil war to the forms of crime later associated with Nigeria. It won the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association and the Fage & Oliver Prize from the African Studies Association of the UK. His new book, Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. He has published on topics that include policing, migration, military labor, and the history of the drug trade, and is researching a global history of military desertion and a book about military imposters, con artists, and “stolen valor.”
Daly earned an MA with distinction in historical research methods from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, followed by an MPhil in African studies from the University of Cambridge, King’s College. He then earned a PhD with distinction in history from Columbia University. He was recently an associate professor of African and African American studies at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Departments of History and International Comparative Studies. He will join the University of Chicago faculty on January 1, 2024.