The Journal of West African History

10th Anniversary Conference

"The State of the Field, and New Directions"

The one-day conference will take place on Friday, October 4th at the Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center on the campus of Michigan State University. A keynote speaker and sixteen invited panelists will contribute to conversations on "The State of the Field, and New Directions" in West African History. Dr. Michael A. Gomez, the Silver Professor of History & Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, will deliver the keynote address on "The State in West Africa." The invited panelists will deliver papers that address the following topics: (1) Archives, Sources, and Methods for West African History; (2) West Africa & the World: Diaspora, Pan-Africanism, and Global Connections; (3) Gender in West African History: Past Developments and Future Directions; and (4) Environment in the History of West Africa. The conference is free and open to the public.

The conference marks the 10th anniversary of the Journal of West African History. Like the conference the journal plans to assess its contributions to the field and move in new directions at the beginning of a new decade. Published semiannually, the Journal of West African History is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed research journal that features the highest quality articles on West African history. It is located at the cutting edge of new scholarship on the social, cultural, economic, and political history of West Africa, and fills a representational gap by providing a forum for serious scholarship and debate on women and gender, sexuality, slavery, oral history, popular and public culture, and religion. JWAH is committed to rigorous thinking and analysis; is international in scope; and offers a critical intervention about knowledge production. Scholarly reviews of current books in the field appear in every issue; and the publication is in both English and French.