
Position Title
Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies
External Chair of American Studies
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.
- Ph.D., African history, UC Berkeley, 2007
- M.A., African history, UC Berkeley, 2002
- B.A., History with minors in Africana Studies and Feminist and Gender Studies, Bryn Mawr College, 1998 (magna cum laude)
- UCD PLACE (Professors Leveraging A Community of Engagement) Scholar of the Quarter, 2022
- UCD FRIENDS (Faculty Retention and Inclusive Excellence Networks—Designing Solutions) grant recipient for founding of the Workplace Climate Action Group, with Lisa Materson, 2021-22
- UCD Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award, 2020
- CD Global Affairs International Collaborations Grant, 2019
- UCD FRI (Feminist Research Institute) Collaborative Research Grant, with Jenny Kaminer and Liz Constable, Feminist Research on Gender and Adolescence, 2017-2019
- Alternate, Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, 2017
- UCD Nominee, NEH Summer Stipend, 2016
- UCD Division of Social Sciences Dean’s Innovation Award, 2016
- Alternate, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, 2016
- Hellman Fellowship, 2012-13
- UCD Faculty Development Award, 2012
- African studies, history of gender and sexuality, childhood and youth, colonialism, international development