From the Harvard Gazette:
What can historians learn by being expert witnesses in court? They can learn to cooperate, to state the facts, and to leave their opinions and academic squabbles in the library.
“There’s no room for academic blather,” said Caroline Elkins, a Harvard history professor who studies colonial rule in East Africa. In court, she said in a recent lecture, the judge is the “teacher” and the academics—famous for squabbling—have to give up their “sandbox.”
In 2008, Elkins was named the first of three “expert witnesses,” historians who were called upon to provide evidence to the High Court of Justice in London. (She and the others are advisers to the British law firm Leigh Day.) At issue is a coming trial that gives aging Kenyan Mau Mau insurgents and sympathizers the opportunity to prove claims of rape, torture, murder, and other crimes that they allege happened in the waning days of British colonial rule in the East African country.
Elkins teaches Africa and Africans: The Making of a Continent in the Modern World at Harvard Extension School. You can also watch an interview with Elkins as she discusses the Mau Mau uprising.