Staff profile

Cherry Leonardi specialises in African history with a particular research focus on South Sudan and northern Uganda. She is currently working on a book project about the historical significance of elephants and broader relations between people and wildlife in South Sudan, for which she held a Carson Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich in 2020.

Her first book Dealing with Government in South Sudan: Histories of Chiefship, Community and State (James Currey, 2013: http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.asp?idProduct=14224) was the result of a doctoral and postdoctoral research project funded by the AHRC, the Leverhulme Trust, the British Institute in Eastern Africa and the British Academy. In 2010 she held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and in 2009-10 she was the lead researcher and author of a report on local justice in South Sudan for the US Institute of Peace and the Rift Valley Institute.

She then worked on a project on land governance and boundary disputes in South Sudan and northern Uganda which led to a publication co-authored with Martina Santschi in the Rift Valley Institute's Contested Borderlands series: Dividing Communities in South Sudan and Northern Uganda: Boundary Disputes and Land Governance (2016), freely available at http://riftvalley.net/publication/dividing-communities-south-sudan-and-northern-uganda#.WBx3Vk9vjIU, a special issue of Critical African Studies on 'Valuing Land in Eastern Africa' and an article in Past & Present (2020).

Recent research includes an AHRC/ESRC-funded collaborative project led by Dr Jonathan Fisher (Birmingham) on narratives around witchcraft and insecurity in the South Sudan-Uganda borderlands (2016-18), and an AHRC Research Networking Programme with Dr Zoe Cormack on South Sudanese Museum Collections in Europe (2017-18) which led to an edited collection Pieces of a Nation (sidestone.com). She was also a co-investigator on an ESRC/DFID Development Frontiers research project: 'Energy on the Move: longitudinal perspectives on energy transitions among marginal populations', led by Dr Ben Campbell in Durham's anthropology department.

Cherry welcomes enquiries from students and researchers about South Sudan and other topics in African history including wildlife, animal and environmental history, colonial governance, local and traditional authority, armed conflict, customary justice, land governance and boundaries and borderlands. Her research on South Sudan benefits from the extensive Sudan Archive in Durham (https://www.dur.ac.uk/library/asc/sudan/), which is also an excellent resource for undergraduate and postgraduate research. She maintains active links with academic and non-academic bodies working in or on South Sudan and the wider eastern Africa region.

Chapter in book

• Leonardi, C. (2018). Mixing oil and water? Colonial state justice and the challenge of witchcraft accusations in central Equatoria, Southern Sudan. In O. Zenker, & M. V. Hoehne (Eds.), The State and the Paradox of Customary Law in Africa (87-108). Routledge
• Leonardi, C., & Vaughan, C. (2016). "We are oppressed and our only way is to write to higher authority”: the politics of claim and complaint in the peripheries of Condominium Sudan. In E. Hunter (Ed.), Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa: Dialogues between Past and Present (74-100). Ohio University Press
• Leonardi, C. (2013). The power of cultures and the cultures of power: John MacKenzie and the study of imperialism. In A. S. Thompson (Ed.), Writing Imperial Histories (49-73). Manchester University Press
• Leonardi, C., & Abdul Jalil, M. (2012). Traditional authority, local government and justice. In J. Ryle, J. Willis, S. Baldo, & J. M. Jok (Eds.), The Sudan handbook (108-121). Rift Valley Institute [digital edition]

Edited book

• Cormack, Z., & Leonardi, C. (Eds.). (2021). Pieces of a Nation: South Sudanese Heritage and Museum Collections. Sidestone Press

Journal Article

• Leonardi, C. (2024). “Extraordinarily Inconspicuous” Elephants: The Interspecies Constitution and Contestations of the Ivory Commodity Frontier in Nineteenth-Century South Sudan. Environmental History, 29(2), 254-280. https://doi.org/10.1086/729404
• Fisher, J., & Leonardi, C. (2021). Insecurity and the invisible: The challenge of spiritual (in)security. Security Dialogue, 52(5), 383-400. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010620973540
• Leonardi, C., Storer, E., & Fisher, J. (2021). Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland. Political Geography, 90, Article 102442. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102442
• Leonardi, C. (2020). Patchwork States: the localization of state territoriality on the South Sudan-Uganda border, 1914-2014. Past & Present: A Journal of Historical Studies, 248(1), 209-258. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz052
• Leonardi, C., & Browne, A. J. (2018). Introduction: valuing land in Eastern Africa. Critical African Studies, 10(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/21681392.2018.1495088
• Leonardi, C. (2015). Points of order? Local government meetings as negotiation tables in South Sudanese history. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 9(4), 650-668. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2015.1105440
• Rolandsen, Ø. H., & Leonardi, C. (2014). Discourses of violence in the transition from colonialism to independence in southern Sudan, 1955–1960. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 8(4), 609-625. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2014.949599
• Leonardi, C. (2013). South Sudanese Arabic and the negotiation of the local state, c. 1840-2011. Journal of African History, 54(3), 351-372. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021853713000741
• Leonardi, C. (2011). Paying 'buckets of blood' for the land: moral debates over economy, war and state in Southern Sudan. Journal of Modern African Studies, 49(2), 215-240. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022278x11000024
• Leonardi, C., Isser, D., Moro, L., & Santschi, M. (2011). The politics of customary law ascertainment in South Sudan. Journal of legal pluralism and unofficial law, 63, 111-142
• Leonardi, C. (2009). Local justice and power of an official nature in Southern Sudan. Revista CIDOB d'afers internacionals (1985. Internet), 87, 65-93
• Leonardi, C. (2007). Violence, sacrifice and chiefship in Central Equatoria, Southern Sudan. Africa, 77(4), 535-558. https://doi.org/10.3366/afr.2007.77.4.535
• Leonardi, C. (2007). 'Liberation' or Capture? Youth in between 'hakuma' and 'home' during civil war and its aftermath in Southern Sudan. African Affairs, 106(424), 391-412. https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adm037
• Leonardi, C. (2007). The Poison in the Ink Bottle: Poison cases and the moral economy of knowledge in 1930s Equatoria, Sudan. Journal of Eastern African Studies, 1(1), 34-56. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531050701218825
• Leonardi, C. (2003). Laying the first course of stones: building the London Missionary Society Church in Madagascar, 1862-1895. The International journal of African historical studies, 3, 607-633

Monograph

• Leonardi, C. (2013). Dealing with Government in South Sudan: histories of chiefship, community and state. James Currey

Report

• Waanzi Hillary, I., Amuom, M., & Leonardi, C. (2024). Elephants Are Stories Now: Understanding The Loss Of Elephants In South Sudan. Rift Valley Institute
• Leonardi, C. (2019). Making Order Out of Disorder: Customary authority in South Sudan. Rift Valley Institute
• Leonardi, C., & Santschi, M. (2016). Dividing Communities in South Sudan and Northern Uganda: boundary disputes and land governance. Rift Valley Institute
• Leonardi, C., Moro, L. N., Santschi, M., & Isser, D. (2010). Local Justice in Southern Sudan. United States Institute of Peace and the Rift Valley Institute