Dr. Ethan Sanders is a fourth generation Coloradan, born and raised in the Denver area. He later completed his doctoral work at the University of Cambridge where he was drawn to the emerging sub-field of global intellectual history, with a geographic focus on Africa and the Indian Ocean World. Broadly speaking, he is interested in the political and religious history of Africa and the Middle East and he has previously published on the Zanzibar Revolution and the Cold War, African political thinkers, missionaries and empire in Africa, Christian-Muslim relations in East Africa and gender and ethnicity in Zanzibar. Dr. Sanders first book, Building the African Nation: The African Association and Pan-Africanism in Twentieth Century East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2025) looks at how early strands of pan-African thought ignited the political imaginations of East African intellectuals and political activists in the colonial and post-colonial periods. His second book project, Julius Nyerere: Africa’s Global Visionary of the Twentieth Century (under contract with Yale University Press) is a religious and intellectual biography of Julius Nyerere—arguably the most important African of the century—explored through a global lens. Beyond research, he sees his vocation as a scholar-mentor and was attracted to Regis because of the Ignatian principle cura personalis, or care for the whole person. Dr. Sanders loves teaching a breadth of courses at Regis and working one-on-one with students.
