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Profile
My interest in African history began as a U.S. Peace Corps volunteer in the Republic of Benin, where I served as an English teacher in a government-run secondary school. I joined the Peace Corps after working for an international law firm in New York. Questions about how West African communities conceptualize and engage with law continue to animate much of my research.
Since my time in Benin, I have lived and worked in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea (Conakry), Mali, and Senegal. Using Arabic, Bamanankan/Jula, and French, I draw on oral and archival sources to explore how ordinary people have lived through the massive social changes of the last two centuries. I have published broadly on topics including colonial and Islamic law, religious conversion, migrant labour, and domestic slavery and its afterlives across francophone West Africa.
I received my B.A. from Columbia University in 2016 and my Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2024, where I was a Mellon Foundation Dissertation Fellow.
Teaching
At Trinity, I supervise undergraduate students in African and World History. I have previously worked as a temporary lecturer at San Francisco State University and as a graduate teaching fellow at Stanford.
My teaching also includes community-oriented work. In 2024, I taught a class called ‘Women, Fiction, and World History’ at Hope House, a rehabilitation facility for formerly incarcerated women in Redwood City, California. I have also tutored students in New York City Public Schools and served in mentorship programs for first-generation undergraduate students.
Research
My first book project, Paths to Justice: A Legal Ecology of the Ivorian-Guinean Forest Zone, c. 1800–1960, investigates the entangled legal and environmental history of a transnational region spanning present-day Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea from the end of the Atlantic slave trade to independence.
I am also a team member of the Senegal Liberations Project, a digital humanities collaborative funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (U.S.). Our group examines the ‘Registers of Liberations’, nineteenth-century logbooks that record the names and biodata of nearly 30,000 enslaved Senegambians who sought their freedom between 1857 and 1903. An initial analysis of the registers has appeared in Esclavages & Post-esclavages.
My research has been generously supported by several international scholarly organizations, including both Fulbright-Hays and Fulbright-IIE, the American Society for Legal History, the West African Research Association, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory.
Selected Publications
(forthcoming) ‘“The White Man Forced Me to Work”: Disaggregating Slavery and Contract Labor in Western Côte d’Ivoire, 1890–1940’. French Historical Studies.
Roberts, R. and Teska, W., 2025. ‘Widows, “Ordinary” Men, and Levirate Disputes in the Early Colonial French Soudan, 1905–1913’. In: J. Davidson and B.N. Lawrance, eds., Pathos and Power: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Widowhood in Africa, Past and Present. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Teska, W. , 2024. ‘Making Marriages at the “End of Slavery”: Religion, Identity, and Law in the Early Colonial French Soudan’. Slavery & Abolition, 45(2).
Teska, W., 2022. ‘Dead-End Scandal in M’Pésoba: Local Politics and Colonial Justice in French West Africa, 1913–1918’. The Journal of African History, 63(3).