Ian Stewart

A native of Toronto, Canada, Ian Stewart earned his BA in Political Science from Queen’s University at Kingston in 1990. He went on to Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism where he earned an MS in journalism. Stewart worked as a journalist for The Kingston Whig-Standard, The Toronto Star, The Associated Press, and United Press International among other news outlets. He spent a decade overseas as a correspondent and bureau chief in Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa. Wounded in 1999 by a child soldier in Sierra Leone, he shifted his efforts to academia to understand the juxtaposition of abolitionism and contemporary forms of slavery in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Two years after being injured, he was awarded a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University where he studied colonial and Cold War antecedents to contemporary violence in Africa. He is a founding member of the Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma. In the Spring of 2002, he published Ambushed: A War Reporter’s Life on the Line, a best-selling memoir about his experiences overseas, including an account of his recovery from a traumatic brain injury. In 2007, he entered the University of Michigan’s interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History. Dr. Stewart graduated in 2013 after completing his dissertation: The Tenacity of Bondage: An Anthropological History of Slavery and Unfree Labor in Sierra Leone.

Upon earning his Ph.D., Stewart joined UNM’s International Studies Institute to help transform the senior Capstone class for International Studies majors from an independent study into a student-centric seminar course. In 2014, Dr. Stewart accepted a postdoctoral research and teaching fellowship at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He returned to the University of New Mexico in 2017 as a lecturer in International Studies and is now serving as the International Studies Institute’s Associate Director.

Dr. Stewart’s research interests include colonial and post-colonial Africa, slavery, violence, modernity, and media transformations. He teaches Introduction to International Studies, the Capstone Seminar in International Studies, and various cross-listed topic courses on Africa, slavery, and violence. For more information, please visit Dr. Stewart’s personal website.