Kathryn M. de Luna

Kathryn M. de Luna is an Associate Professor and Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on African history before European colonialism and the Atlantic world's convergence of African, Native American, and European histories. She employs interdisciplinary methods from linguistics, archaeology, and materials science to reconstruct archives of oral societies.

Dr. de Luna holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, along with an M.A. from the same institution and a B.A. from the University of South Carolina. Her research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, NEH, NSF, and Fulbright programs. She explores topics such as enslaved Africans' political ideologies, linguistic exchanges in Atlantic contexts, and the material culture of Central African societies.

Her notable works include Collecting Food, Cultivating People (2016), which won the Wallace Award, and Speaking with Substance (2019). Current projects involve digital archives of African and Native American lexicons and studies on the Bantu Expansions. Awards include the Wallace Award and CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Her research bridges historical linguistics, archaeology, and environmental data to address questions of identity, mobility, and political thought in pre-colonial and early modern Africa. Collaborative grants focus on interdisciplinary approaches to understanding Africa’s longue durée history.