Matthew S. Hopper

Matthew S. Hopper is a Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts. His expertise spans African History, Indian Ocean History, and World History with a focus on slavery, diaspora, and globalization. He holds a Ph.D. from UCLA (2006) and has conducted extensive research on the African diaspora in the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.

Notable awards include the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (2024), NEH Digital Projects Grant (2023-26), and Cal Poly's Distinguished Teaching Award (2021). His research has been supported by fellowships from the SSRC, Gilder Lehrman Center, and Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton).

Current projects include 'Liberated Africans in the Indian Ocean World,' exploring post-abolition migration and labor systems. He has published widely in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes, with his monograph Slaves of One Master (Yale, 2015) a landmark study of African diasporic communities in Arabia.

Hopper teaches courses on World History, African History, and the Indian Ocean, emphasizing transnational and comparative methodologies. His recent work integrates digital humanities to map historical networks across the Indian Ocean.