Allen Isaacman is an American historian specializing in the social history of Southern Africa. He is a Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. In 2015, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[1][2]

Isaacman earned his B.A. at the City College of New York in 1964. He next studied African History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under Jan Vansina and Philip D. Curtin, earning an M.A. in 1966 and a PhD in 1970. That same year, he joined the faculty in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota. In 2001, he became a Regents Professor of History at the University of Minnesota.

From 1978 to 1980, Isaacman was the Chaired Professor of Mozambican History at Eduardo Mondlane University, located in Maputo, Mozambique. From 1988 to 1998, he served as the Director of MacArthur Interdisciplinary Program on Global Change, Sustainability and Justice at the University of Minnesota and retained that role, from 1998 to 2011, as the program transitioned to become the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC).^[2] Meanwhile, from 1997 to 1998, he was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the University of Zimbabwe, in Harare, Zimbabwe, and in 2009 was named an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Western Cape, located in Cape Town, South Africa.

Isaacman awards includes the National Defense and Education Act, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the African Studies Association (ASA), the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Gulbenkian Foundation Fellowship, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation,^[3] the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright), the MacArthur Foundation, and the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences^{[clarification needed]}. His 1972 book, Mozambique: The Africanization of a European Institution, The Zambezi Prazos, 1750-1902, won the Melville J. Herskovits Award as the most distinguished publication on African Studies for the year 1972, while the 2013 book which he coauthored, Dams, Displacement and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965-2007, won both the Herskovits Prize^[4] and the Martin Klein award from the American Historical Association (AHA). In 2013, Isaacman received the Distinguished Africanist Award from the African Studies Association.^[5]