Notes On Contributors
Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry, a Ghanaian poet and historian, is an Associate Professor of African History and World History at Shippensburg University, Pennsylvania. He is a product of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon. He received his Ph.D. in African history from York University, Toronto, Canada, in 1999. He has published over forty-five articles, some of which have appeared in Slavery and Abolition, African Economic History, The International Journal of African Historical Studies, History in Africa, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, Left History, International Journal of Regional Local Studies, African Identities, Ghana Studies, African Issues, Groniek, and the Journal of Cultural Studies. He is currently completing two book manuscripts: Slavery, Abolition, and Colonial Rule in Ghana as well as a historical novel on African experiences in Europe and North America. Some of his poems have appeared in Okike and Ufahamu. His research foci are comparative slavery and abolition; colonial rule and African responses; and gender and labor in the Gold Coast (Ghana). He has held teaching posts at Tulane University, New Orleans, U.S.A., and York University, Toronto, Canada.
Gareth Austin is a reader in economic history at the London School of Economics. He was trained at the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham (PhD 1984). He worked at the universities of Birmingham, Ghana, and London (Institute of Commonwealth Studies) before joining LSE in 1988. He was an editor of the Journal of African History, 2001-2005. His publications include Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807-1956 (University of Rochester Press: Rochester, NY, 2005). He is currently writing a book on aspects of the history of markets in West Africa, and co-editing (with Kaoru Sugihara) a volume on Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History. His major longer-term project is a book on African economic development, 1500-2000.
Obarè Bagodo was awarded a M.A. in “pre-colonial” African/Bààrgu (Borgu) history from the University of Abomey-Calavi, Bénin, a Ph.D. in African archaeology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and he was promoted a Senior Lecturer in archaeology from the Francophone Pan-African Academic Council of Higher Education (CAMES). Since the 1990s, he has been a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Abomey-Calavi, and since 2005 an external lecturer in archaeology at the University of Kara, Togo. Dr. Bagodo has published in such scholarly journals as Afrika Zamani and the West African Journal of Archaeology. His current research is focused on: methodological and ethical issues in African archaeology and history from the prehistoric and protohistoric to the ancient and pre-colonial periods; field investigations in palaeo-environments and settlement patterns from the stone ages to the ancient period before the 16th century A.D. in the Bight of Benin Region (Nigeria, Bénin, Togo and Ghana); and endogenous socio-political advances in Bààrgu and its neighbours in Bénin and Nigeria during the last millennium (10th – 20th centuries A.D.).
Sandra T. Barnes is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Founding Director of its African Studies Center. Her book, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos (1986), won the Amaury Talbot Prize for the best book on Africa. Along with many articles and book chapters, she also is the editor of Africa's Ogun: Old World and New, an interdisciplinary collection of essays that focus on West African religious culture and its continuing vitality in the diaspora. She was President of the African Studies Association, and sits on the Boards of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Foundation for the Advancement of International Medical Education and Research, and the Stanford Humanities Center. She has been a visiting faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Ibadan, and a fellow at the Stanford University Humanities Center. Her current research focuses on West Africa: pre-colonial social and cultural life along the Guinea Coast and post-colonial popular culture.
EdnaG. Bay is Professor of Interdisciplinary and African Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University. Trained as a historian of Africa, she is best known for her work on gender in West Africa, including Wives of the Leopard; Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (University Press of Virginia, 1998). She recently completedAsen, Ancestors, and Vodun: Tracing Change in African Art (University of Illinois Press, 2008). Her new work focuses on the cultural history of ancestral sculptures in southern Benin. She has edited five collections of studies on Africa on topics that include women, art, the African Diaspora, and violence. Formerly the Executive Director of the African Studies Association, she has served as Director of the Institute of African Studies of Emory College.
Lynne Brydon is Senior Lecturer at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, and served as its Director from September, 2007. She is the co-author of two books, with Sylvia Chant, Women in the Third World: Gender Issues in Rural and Urban Areas, (1989) and, with Karen Legge, Adjusting Society: The World Bank, the IMF and Ghana, (1996). Since 1995 she has worked with staff at the University of Ghana, Legon and Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone to set up postgraduate gender courses. She is co-editor of Ghana Studies and a member of the Editorial Working Group of the Review of African Political Economy. Her forthcoming book focuses on social history and change in Avatime, Ghana, where she has researched since the early 1970s. Her current interests are in West Africa, social history in southern Ghana and she maintains a long--term interest in gender studies.
Matt D. Childs is an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He has published articles in The Journal of Latin American Studies, The Americas, The Historian, The History Workshop Journal, and the Latin American Research Review. He has co-edited with Toyin Falola The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World (2005) and his single authored book The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (2006) was on three finalists for the Fredrick Douglass Book Prize. Childs has received research grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Ford Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Fulbright-Hays.
Alioune Deme is Lecturer of Anthropology and African History at Texas Southern University. He has published on Early Metallurgy in West Africa, Early Islam, the colonial era, and on African and African-American historiographies. His current research focuses on prehistory, pre-colonial and colonial histories of West Africa and the Sahara: Late Stone and Iron Age, paleo-climate, African response to innovation and environment and technological changes, Geo-archaeology, archaeological theories, Complexity theories (Heterarchy Vs Hierarchy), African socio-political systems, Early Islam and Atlantic archaeology, Cultural resources management, socio-cultural memories analysis, and social entrepreneurship.
Toyin Falola is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a University Distinguished Teaching Professor. A Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria and a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, Falola is author and editor of more than sixty books. He is coeditor of the Journal of African Economic History, Series Editor of Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, and the Series Editor of Culture and Customs of Africa by Greenwood Press. Falola has received various awards and honors, including the Ibn Khaldun Distinguished Award for Research Excellence and the Jean Halloway Award for Teaching Excellence. He has been presented with three Festschriften, various lifetime awards, and an honorary doctorate.
David Henige is the Africanist bibliographer at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, and editor of History in Africa, both since 1974. He is interested in historical method and epistemology, and source criticism, not only for Africa but for other evidentially underserved areas of the past. His most recent book is Historical Evidence and Argument (2005), and he has written on numbers in history, the sources for Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the Americas, on the chronology of oral tradition, and on various other aspects of the past, ranging from the biblical world to traditional New Zealand, with stops in ancient Media, medieval India, the Iroquois Confederacy and several other places, along the way.
Tony Hopkins, formerly Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge, and currently an Emeritus Fellow of Pembroke College, is the Walter Prescott Webb Professor of History in the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stirling, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. His interests cover African history, imperialism and globalization. He has been an editor of both the Journal of African History and the Economic History Review, and his publications range from An Economic History of West Africa (1973) to British Imperialism, 1688-2000, written with Peter Cain, which was first published in 1993 and appeared in a second edition 2001. His most recent books are Globalisation in World History (2002), and Global History: Interactions between the Universal and the Local (2006). He is currently working on a comparison of British and American ‘empires’.
Joseph Inikori is Professor of History, University of Rochester. He was previously Head of the Department of History, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. He is the author of Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), which won the 2003 American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award for "the most outstanding work in English on any aspect of the field of 17th- and 18th-century western European history," and also the 2003 African Studies Association's Herskovits Award. Joseph Inikori has held various administrative positions at the University of Rochester since he moved there in 1988, including Associate Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies (1989-1998) and Director of Graduate Studies, History Department (2001-2006). Before leaving Nigeria for the United States, he served briefly as one of the founding Directing Staff of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, Jos, Nigeria (1979) and was appointed by President Babangida (1987) to chair a presidential panel charged with the task of working out solutions to the problem of inter-group relations in Nigeria.
Maurice Jackson is an assistant Professor of Atlantic and African American History at Georgetown University. He specializes in social protest movements’ culture and ideology. He was a 2006 Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress. His manuscript Anthony Benezet: Founding Father of Atlantic Emancipation will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in the spring 2008. The work is an intellectual and social history of the transatlantic fight against slavery triggered by the French born Huguenot, Anthony Benezet (1713-1784). Benezet settled in Philadelphia in 1731, joined the Quakers, founded the School for African Peoples and energized the Antislavery movement through his many pamphlets and his correspondence with antislavery thinkers, leaders and activists throughout the Atlantic world. He will soon begin workon Race over Reason: the Social, Intellectual and Political Foundations of Liberal White America’s Abandonment of Its Black Brethren, From the American Revolution to the End of Reconstruction (1776-1877).
Ella Keren teaches African History at the Open University of Israel. She has co-writtenand edited several books on colonialism, de-colonization and African nationalism (in Hebrew). She has recently completed a PhD thesis on collective memory of slavery and the slave trade in Ghana. She is also interested in modern manifestations of slavery and is active in an NGO in Israel dedicated to the struggle against trafficking in people.
Axel Klein is a Lecturer in the Study of Addictive Behaviour, Institute of Psychiatry, Kent Institute for Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Kent. He is a social anthropologist with special interest in the social function of psychoactive substances, and the politics and policies of drug control. He has worked as a researcher and policy consultant in West and Eastern Africa, the Caribbean and South America, the UK, Eastern Europe and Afghanistan. Research interests include the cultivation and distribution of cannabis in the Caribbean, the distribution, use and politics of khat, and the networking and recruitment of drug couriers as well as policy responses. Publications include as chief editor Caribbean Drugs: From Criminalization to Harm Reduction, Zed, 2004, with David Anderson, Susan Beckerleg, and Degol Hailu, The Khat Controversy: Stimulating the Debate on Drugs, Oxford: Berg, 2007, and 'Working on the other side of the cocaine route – Hibiscus in Jamaica’, Drugs and Alcohol Today, vol 1, issue 4, March 2005
Chapurukha M. Kusimba received his undergraduate education at Kenya University, Nairobi, majoring in African history and linguistics in 1986 and doctorate in anthropological archaeology from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania in 1993. He is currently Curator of Anthropology and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Before joining the Field Museum, he had served for seven years as Research Scientist at the National Museums of Kenya. He has published extensively on the archaeology and ethnology of East Africa. His books include, The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (1999), East African Archaeology:Foragers, Potters, Smiths, and Traders (co-edited with Sibel B. Kusimba (2003), and Unwrapping a Little Known Textile Tradition: The Field Museums Madagascar Textile Collection (2004). Chapurukha is conducting the first truly in-depth regional analysis of early East African interaction spheres, centered around the Swahili Coast, Tsavo, and Mount Elgon in Kenya. He also co-directs archaeological research in India, Madagascar, and Illinois. Chapurukha’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Fellowship, the National Geographic Society, and the Field Museum. He is currently the Vice Chairman of the Anthropology Department at the Field Museum.
Paul E. Lovejoy, FRSC, is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of History. He holds the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History and is Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples. He is also Research Professor at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull, UK. Select recent publications include Evolución, Independencia y emancipación: La lucha contra la esclavitud (2008), co-edited with Rina Cáceres Gómez, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (2nd ed. Revised and expanded 2007), co-edited with Robin Law, Slavery, Commerce and Production inWest Africa: Slave Society in the Sokoto Caliphate ( 2005). His award winning Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa has been translated into Portuguese in the prestigious series, Civilização Brasileira, as A escravidão na África. Uma história de suas transformações ( 2003).
T.C. McCaskie was until 2006 Professor of Asante History at the Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham, U.K. He is now Professor of the History of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, U.K. He has published State and Society in Pre-Colonial Asante (1995) and Asante Identities: History and Modernity in an African Village 1850-1950 (2000). He was co-editor of 'The History of Ashanti Kings and the whole country itself' and Other Writings by Otumfuo, Nana Agyeman Prempeh I (2003). He has also published numerous papers on Asante. In 2003 he was publicly honoured in Kumase by Otumfuo, Asantehene Osei Tutu II for his contribution to the understanding of Asante history and culture.
Rahul Oka received his BA from Lawrence University in Appleton, WI in 2000, specializing in anthropology and biology and his doctorate in archaeological anthropology from the Joint Program of the departments of anthropology of University of Illinois-Chicago and the Field Museum, in 2008. He is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame and Research Associate at the Field Museum. Rahul’s research program aims to understand the role played by regional and inter-continental commerce in shaping the rise and fall of societies and settlements. His current research is focused on understanding the role of trade and commerce in resource distribution in conflict-zones in Western Kenya, specifically the Mt. Elgon region and the Pokot district. He is also co-directing archaeological research on the Western coast of India and the Kenyan Coast.
José Guadalupe Ortega is an Irvine Fellow at Whittier College. He will be joining the faculty at Whittier College as Assistant Professor of History. He has co-edited several volumes of the Statistical Abstract of Latin America (UCLA Latin American Center Publications). His current research focuses on the transfer and exchange of practical, technical, and management knowledge within the Cuban sugar mill complex in the early nineteenth century.
Olatunji Ojo is Assistant Professor of History at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. He is the co-editor (with Paul E. Lovejoy) of Documents in Yoruba History (forthcoming), a book which uses biography to analyze nineteenth century Yorubaland and has recently published "Slavery and Human Sacrifice in Yorubaland: Ondo c1870-1894," Journal of African History, 46, 3 (2005), 379-404. He has previously taught at Ohio University, Athens, USA and the University of Ibadan (Nigeria). His research focuses on West African History (Social and Economic), African Diapora, and Gender.
Luís Nicolau Parés holds a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), of the University of London (1997). He has lived in Salvador since 1998 and he is a tenured professor of the Department of Anthropology and the Postgraduate Program in Ethnic and African Studies of the Federal University of Bahia. A specialist in the history and anthropology of African and Afro-Brazilian religions, he has conducted fieldwork in Bahia, Maranhão and Benin. He is the author of A formação do candomblé: história e ritual da nação jeje na Bahia (Campinas, Editora Unicamp, 2006) and co-editor of the journal Afro-Ásia. His current research focuses on the history of West African religious practices and of African ethnicities in Bahia.