Dr. Saheed Aderinto | Professor of History | Florida International University

Saheed Aderinto is a Professor of History based at Florda International University. A filmmaker and the Founding President of the Lagos Studies Association, he is the author of “Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria” (Ohio University Press/New African Histories Series, 2022), “Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order” (Indiana University Press, 2018), and “When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958” (University of Illinois Press, 2015), which won the 2016 Nigerian Studies Association's Book Award Prize for the “most important scholarly book/work on Nigeria published in the English language." His current book project, “Fuji: An African Popular Culture” is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. The first episode of his debut documentary film, “The Fuji Documentary,” premiered in February 2024.

Dr. Peter Alegi | Professor of History | Michigan State University

Peter Alegi is a Professor of History at Michigan State University. He is the author of Laduma! Soccer, Politics & Society in South Africa and African Soccerscapes: How a Continent Changed the World’s Game, and co-editor of Africa’s World Cup and South Africa and the Global Game. Some of his recent work has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, the International Journal of the History of Sport, and Radical History Review, as well as in edited books like Sports in Africa and Global Africa. He co-hosted the Africa Past and Present podcast and has been convening the Football Scholars Forum since 2010. He is the Series Editor of Michigan State University Press’s “African History and Culture Series” and serves on the Executive Board of the Sports Africa Network, and on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of African Historical Studies and African Studies.

Dr. Bright Alozie | Assistant Professor of Black Studies | Portland State University

Dr. Bright Alozie is assistant professor in the Black Studies Department at Portland State University. He is also affiliate faculty in the Departments of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He holds a PhD in History from West Virginia University. Dr. Alozie’s core research interests focus on colonial and postcolonial Africa and the African diaspora, particularly social and political history, women and gender studies, petitions and documentary sources, digital and oral histories, as well as protests and social movements. Dr. Alozie has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals and contributed chapters in edited volumes.

Dr. Jody Benjamin | Associate Professor of History | Howard University

Jody Benjamin is a social and cultural historian of western Africa with expertise in the period between 1650 and 1850. His research is informed by a methodological concern to center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the limitations of the colonial archive. His first book, “The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850,” explores questions of state-making, social hierarchy and self-making across parts of Mali, Senegal and Guinea through the lens of textiles and dress in a context shaped by an emergent global capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. In broad terms, Prof. Benjamin’s scholarship interrogates the multiple connections between west African, African diaspora and global histories through the lens of material culture, technology, labor, gender and race in order to reshape how historians think about western Africa’s role in the history of global capitalism and its connections to contemporary questions of global inequality. He is an Associate Professor of History at Howard University.

Dr. Robin P. Chapdelaine | Associate Director of the Center for African Studies| Stanford University

Robin P. Chapdelaine is the Associate Director of the Center for African Studies at Stanford University. Her research focuses on Women’s and Gender and African history with an emphasis on child slavery and human trafficking. She is author of The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria (2021) and is guest editor for the special issue “Retrospectives on Child Slavery in Africa” in Genealogy. She is co-editor of When Will the Joy Come? Black Women in the Ivory Tower (2023) and is currently working on her next book Embrace Black Joy: How Empathetic Teaching Empowers All Students.

Dr. Robyn d'Avignon | Associate Professor of History | New York University

Robyn d'Avignon is an anthropologist and historian of West Africa with a focus on Senegal. She is Associate Professor of History at New York University, where she teaches African history in addition to courses on the history of science, technology, and the environment. Her first book, A Ritual Geology, establishes West African miners as producers of subterranean knowledge and introduces transnational geological formations as a new regional framework for African studies.

Dr. Mark Deets | Assistant Professor of History | American University in Cairo

Mark W. Deets is a social and cultural historian of modern Africa, with a research focus on the Senegambian region of West Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. His research emerges from his diplomatic experience working to bring about lasting peace in Senegal’s Casamance region. Deets studies the ways in which separatist elites have tried to counter-map a Casamançais identity against Senegal through particular social spaces: the river, the rice field, the school, the forest and the stadium. As separatists sought to transform these spaces into places for a putative Casamançais nation, ordinary Casamançais contested, corroborated, or ignored separatist assertions, revealing a second layer of counter-mapping based on local values and interests. Deets shows why the history of this socio-cultural mapping and counter-mapping has been so important to the Casamance conflict. He also serves as Francophone Book Review Editor for The Journal of West African History.

Dr. Trevor R. Getz | Professor of African and World History | San Francisco State University

Trevor R. Getz is a Professor of African and World History at San Francisco State University. His work focuses on history education – especially in the field of world history – as well as the social history of Africa. He is the author or co-author of eleven volumes, including Abina and the Important Men, which won the 2014 James Harvey Robinson Prize. His work has been published by Duke UP, Oxford UP, Ohio UP, Bloomsbury, Prentice Hall, Westview, and James Currey. It has also appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of West African History, Slavery and Abolition, African Economic History, and Ghana Studies. Trevor has also written produced a number of documentaries and historical films which have garnered festival prizes, and has held Visiting Professorships at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. He is the recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2020 Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award.

Dr. David Glovsky | Assistant Professor of History | Harvard University

David Glovsky is a historian of 19th and 20th century West Africa, with a focus on Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Guinea. His research and teaching interests include histories of mobility and migration, borderlands, spatial history, Islam, citizenship, pastoralism, gender, and histories of popular culture/sport. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a variety of topics in African History and African Studies, with an eye to understanding the global dimensions and connections of African societies and peoples, both in the past and present. His research, teaching, and service is animated by a focus on social justice and equity, and in broadening historical perspectives to include oppressed and underrepresented communities.

Dr. Walter Hawthorne | Professor of African and Digital History | Michigan State University

Walter Hawthorne is a Professor of African and Digital History, the director of Enslaved.org, and an editor of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation. His research focuses on the history of Atlantic slavery and the Atlantic trade in enslaved people of African descent. In addition, he has written on African agricultural practices, religious beliefs, and family structures in the Old and New Worlds. He has partnered with Matrix, MSU’s digital humanities center, on a number of grant-sponsored digital projects.

Dr. Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué | Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies | University of Wisconsin-Madison

Mougoué has a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history and specializes in women’s and gender history in mid-20th century West Africa. Her book, Gender, Separatist Politics and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon, received the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize, the 2021 Aidoo-Snyder Prize, and the 2023 Honorable Mention (1st runner-up) of the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing. Mougoué was selected as one of 15 African women historians shaping understandings of Africa’s historical past by AMAKA magazine in 2022. Mougoué co-edits a book series on women and gender in Africa for the University of Wisconsin Press.

Dr. Michelle Moyd | Professor of History | Michigan State University

Michelle Moyd is a historian of eastern Africa who studies the region’s histories of soldiering and warfare. At Michigan State, she teaches courses in African history. She has also previously taught courses on World War I, the history of soldiers and veterans, and histories of humanitarianism. She is currently a Red Cedar Distinguished Faculty member at MSU. Before joining the MSU faculty, she was Ruth N. Halls Associate Professor of History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She received her Ph.D. in History from Cornell University in 2008 and held residential fellowships at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas—Austin and at the International Research Center on Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History in Berlin.

Dr. John Mugane | Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures | Harvard University

John M. Mugane is Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures at Harvard University and the Director of the African Language Program in the Department of African and African American Studies. Mugane's research focuses on African Languages and Linguistics and their narrativization. He is the founding director of the language program since 2003 developing the teaching of African languages and cultures. Mugane also does work on African languages in the disciplines and professions for which he, together with African colleagues have held conferences at Harvard, Bamako, Conackry, United States International University (USIU) in Nairobi and the University of Nairobi School of Law in Kenya. Prof Mugane is currently, working on Thiomi-Lugha project which is a Natural Language Processing initiative for Africa’s languages.

Dr. Harmony O’Rourke | Professor of History | Pitzer College

Harmony O’Rourke is Professor of History and Gender Feminist Studies at Pitzer College, with expertise in modern African History. She holds a Ph.D. in African History from Harvard University and is author of Hadija’s Story: Diaspora, Gender, and Belonging in the Cameroon Grassfields (Indiana University Press, 2017). Her scholarly articles have appeared in History in Africa: A Journal of Method, Journal of West African History, and Oxford University Press’s Encyclopedia of African Women's History. Her current research explores the cultural histories of natural disaster, global science, and postcolonial politics in Cameroon.

Dr. Harry Nii Koney Odamtten | Associate Professor of African and Atlantic History | Santa Clara University

Harry Nii Koney Odamtten is Associate Professor of African and Atlantic History at Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California. He holds a Dual Ph.D. in African American & African Studies, and History from Michigan State University, and earned his Bachelors from the University of Ghana, Legon. Odamtten is primarily an intellectual and social historian, and has recently published Edward W. Blyden's Intellectual Transformations: Afropublicanism, Pan-Africanism, Islam, and the Indigenous West African Church (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2019). He is also an Editor of the Journal of West African History. His research and publications span African and African Diaspora intellectual and social history, African and African-American gender and women’s studies, Pan-Africanism, Hip-Hop and public culture. He teaches courses on Africa and others at the intersection of Africa, its African Diaspora, and the Atlantic Diaspora.

Dr. Nana Osei-Opare | Assistant Professor of History | Rice University

Nana Osei-Opare is a historian of African, Cold War, and international histories. Through the words of everyday people and the intellectual and political elite, Osei-Opare’s first book project, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War and Decolonization Projects (contracted with Cambridge’s Global and International History Series), tells a new history of Ghana’s Cold War, political-economic, and decolonization projects during the Kwame Nkrumah era (1957-66). It situates Ghana within local and global twentieth century Marxist, racial, and socialist debates and geographies, and unpacks how Ghana-Soviet spaces influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana’s transformational attempts to achieve black freedom.

Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu | Associate Professor of African Studies | Georgetown University

Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Otu is a cultural anthropologist with interests ranging from the politics of sexual, environmental, and technological citizenships, public health, to their intersections with shifting racial formations in neocolonial and neoliberal Africa and the African Diaspora. Otu’s first book monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, is part of the New Sexual Worlds Series edited by Marlon Bailey and Jeffrey McCune and is published by the University of California Press.

Dr. Dean Rehberger | Director | MATRIX

Dean Rehberger (he/him) is the Director of MATRIX and also Associate Professor in the Department of History at MSU. Dean specializes in developing digital technologies for research and teaching. Dean oversees Matrix project planning, research and development, coordinating many of the grant-funded projects for the Center. His research includes Semantic Web and big data; digital history, humanities, and social sciences; digital libraries, museums and archives (GLAM); and digital technologies in the classroom. Please see Matrix for details.

Dr. Madina Thiam | Assistant Professor of History | New York University

Madina Thiam is an Assistant Professor of History at New York University. Her writing has appeared in the CODESRIA Bulletin, Journal of African History, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, and Islamic Africa, among other venues. She holds a PhD in History from UCLA, and is currently at work on her first book manuscript, The Inland Shore: an Intimate History of the West African Sahel.

Dr. Assan Sarr | Associate Professor of History | Ohio University

Assan Sarr is an Associate Professor of History at Ohio University. He is the author and co-author of several book chapters and articles, which appeared in the African Economic History, African Studies Review, Journal of West African History and Mande Studies. Sarr's first book, Islam, Power and Dependency in the Gambia River Basin: The Politics of Land Control, 1790-1940 explores the impact of Islamization, the development of peanut production, and the imposition of colonial rule on people living along the middle and lower Gambia River. Currently, he is working on two projects on descendants of Liberated Africans in Bathurst (The Gambia) and on a Sufi clerical family. Over the past couple of years, Dr. Sarr has served as a Visiting Scholar at the University of The Gambia where, among other responsibilities, he taught courses in African History and supervised research of graduate students. He has served as a consultant to a few agencies based in and outside of the United States. Dr. Sarr is affiliated with the Center for International Studies at Ohio University especially the African Studies Program and the International Development Studies Program. He also is affiliated with the Contemporary History Institute.

Dr. Rebecca E. Wall | Assistant Professor of History | Loyola Marymount University

Rebecca Wall is Assistant Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University. Her research centers on the Environmental History of West Africa and digital histories of enslavement and liberation. Wall currently co-directs the Senegal Liberations Project, an international digital history initiative with colleagues in the US, Europe, and Senegal. She has also published interdisciplinary scholarship with colleagues in sciences and social sciences. Wall is currently writing a monograph on the twentieth-century history of the Senegal River basin.