PRESCOTT – Just because you grow up in a small town doesn’t mean you can’t explore the world and experience new cultures. After all, Prescott High School alumnus Dr. Nicole Eggers, an expert on Central African history, once sat in the seats of Mr. Ryan’s class too.

Eggers visited Jeff Ryan’s social studies classes at Prescott High School on Friday, Sept. 18 to talk about her travels, experiences and career.

“The students (and their teacher) were completely captivated by her story,” Ryan said. “She is a 2001 Prescott grad and one of the foremost experts on Central Africa. She also is a Lac Du Flambeau pioneer; she was among the first group of students to make the trip and called the trip to LDF life changing and career altering.”

Eggers, an associate professor of African and World History at University of Tennessee Knoxville, was in town visiting family and friends. She also attended her 25^th class reunion.

“Whenever I’m in town when I can, I like to visit Mr. Ryan’s classes,” Eggers said. “I talked about how I got from Mr. Ryan’s classroom to being a historian of Congo.”

Eggers, who is fluent in Swahili and French, relayed to students the work that historians do and what it means.

“What does it mean to go and find sources to write history, to write history that hasn’t been written yet? The challenges and possibilities,” Eggers said.

She spoke a lot about how language and language learning can be important tools for a historian. Asking people about their lives and experiences in their own language shows you’ve put time and energy into understanding their world and view, Eggers said.

“Learning another language helps you cultivate a different kind of relationship with people,” Eggers said. “It’s a way to open doors to have experiences with other people. It helps us to see how different world views shape how we see the world. We can miss how the ideas and words they’re expressing can carry different kinds of connotations when they’re translated to English. The value is not just translating one word to another; it’s using your mind to perceive the world differently.”

Eggers credits Ryan’s First Nations class for jumpstarting her curiosity about other cultures.

“I really first encountered the idea of histories of colonization from the people who were colonized,” Eggers said of the inaugural trip to Lac du Flambeau Reservation. “It changed my understanding of history. It really taught me the value of learning from people in their own space about their own culture and that there’s power in hearing other people’s understanding about their past and present. I was opened up to new cultural worlds in a way that I hadn’t been before. I wondered how much I didn’t know about other cultures and people’s experiences in the world.”

Eggers attended St. Norbert College in De Pere for her undergraduate degree. Her first semester, she took a course on African History.

“Mr. Ryan’s classes had taught me to be curious. From there I fell in love with the field of African History,” Eggers said. “I was shocked by how much I didn’t know when I first started learning about it.”

After graduating, Eggers completed a PhD in African History at UW-Madison, which has one of the best African History programs in the country. Her dissertation focused on a 20^th century religious movement in eastern Congo that was a combination of indigenous and Christian beliefs.

“It was perceived as very threatening by the Belgian colonial government,” Eggers said.

Its followers were surveilled, incarcerated and put in prison camps in the 1940s and 50s.

“They (the government) were threatened by this teaching that was inherent to the religious movement that African indigenous beliefs are equally important and God given,” Eggers said.

Eggers has been to Congo six times and spent a year there doing her dissertation research. She is dedicated to giving people a voice who otherwise might have had their histories lost.

“How do you find sources for the experiences and perspective for the people whose voices were too often left out of the archival past, out of the documents in many ways?” she asked. “We have to rely on other kinds of sources in oral history; these kinds of questions became driving questions for me.”

According to her University of Tennessee biography, she is dedicated to teaching students how to ask evocative questions, think critically and write effectively. She encourages students to reevaluate what they think they know about Africa by introducing them to historical methods and narratives. She has been at UT since 2017; before that, she taught at Loyola University in New Orleans.

Eggers is the author of “Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo,” published by Ohio University Press in 2023. She is working on a second book with Dr. Roger Alfani, which “investigates the significance of religion at different junctures of the Congolese refugee experience.” They have been interviewing Congolese refugees who fled war-torn eastern Congo and are living in refugee camps or urban areas in Kenya, Burundi and Uganda, as well as refugees resettled in the United States.

When speaking to Ryan’s First Nations class, they discussed the commonalities between Native American and African history. There are quite a few.

“The kids had really great questions and they were very attentive. They seemed very curious and they had thoughtful questions to ask me,” Eggers said.