Alumni Notes

Teferi Abate (Ph.D., Anthropology, 2000) has been named chairman of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Addis Ababa University.

Peter Alegi (Ph.D., History, 2000) has been an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University since 2005. He works on South African social and cultural history and teaches courses in South African and African history, as well as sport and African Studies. He is the author of Laduma! Soccer, Politics, and Society in South Africa (University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2004).

Ibrahim Bashir (Ph.D., History, 1983) is now director of studies at the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies, Kuru, Nigeria. He was in Boston recently to develop a linkage program with the BU School of Management.

Barbara Cooper (Ph.D., History, 1992) teaches at Rutgers University, is Director of the African Studies Program, and is author of Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel. For this book Barbara Cooper received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize for the Best Book in African Studies for 2006 from the African Studies Association.

Tim Docking (Ph.D., Political Science, 1999) is Senior Advisor to the Chief Executive Officer of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). Prior to joining MCC, Tim was a White House Fellow and before that worked for three years as an African affairs specialist at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Kevin Dunn (Ph.D., Political Science, 2000), is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. His monograph Imagining the Congo was published by Palgrave in 2003. He has also co-edited three books: Africa's Challenge to International Relations Theory (with Timothy M. Shaw; 2001), Identity and Global Politics (with Patricia Goff; 2004) and most recently African Guerrillas (with Morten Boas; 2007). He has two daughters who bring him much joy.

Anita Fabos (Ph.D., Anthropology, 1999) is teaching in the Department of Anthropology at the American University in Cairo. She has received funding for research on the cultural aspects of Egyptian nationalism and how these pertain to Egyptian immigration and refugee policy. Anita is also involved in a refugee studies program starting up at AUC.

Ama Baidu Forson (MA, Economics, 2007) is currently in Philadelphia working for an international company that focuses on economic and financial analysis in Africa.

Heidi Gengenbach (MA, History) completed her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Minnesota on history and memory among Mozambican women.
The thesis won the Gutenberg-e prize of the American Historical Association and was published as an electronic book entitled Binding Memories: Women as Makers and Tellers of History in Magude, Mozambique by Columbia University Press in 2005.

Erik Gilbert (Ph.D., History, 1997) is now Professor of History at Arkansas State. His dissertation was published as Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar (2004). Erik has also published with coauthor and ASC alum Jonathan Reynolds, Africa in World History (2004) and Trading Tastes: Commodity and Cultural Exchange to 1750 (2006). A second edition of Africa in World History was released with an '07 copyright. A Chinese translation of the first edition of Africa in World History was also released this year.

Nancy J. Hafkin (Ph.D., History, 1974) has retired from the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and settled in the Greater Boston area. The Association for Progressive Communication (APC) has announced the "Hafkin Prize" to honor her work as a pioneer in the area of networking, development information, and electronic communications in Africa, over the course of a 23-year career.

Gwyn Hainsworth, (Ed.M., International Educational Development, 1995) currently works as a Senior Advisor for Pathfinder International where she provides technical and strategic direction for their global youth
portfolio. Gwyn spends roughly 50% of her time overseas, usually in SSA countries, providing technical assistance to Pathfinder programs.
Currently, she works in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Mozambique.

Tom Herlehy (Ph.D., History, 1985) reports with pleasure that he is joining the CARANA Corporation effective 10/9/07 and will be based in Accra, Ghana with a regional office in Dakar, Senegal. This move results from CARANA's winning of a $40 million contract with the USAID Ghana Mission for phase 2 of the West African Trade Hub. Tom looks forward to leading this export promotion project spanning most of West Africa. He can be contacted through the CARANA Corporation offices in Arlington Virginia.

Heather Hoag (Ph.D., History, 2003) is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of San Francisco. She is also the Director of African Studies and is involved in developing USF's International Studies and Environmental Studies programs. She specializes in environmental history with an emphasis in water and economic development. Her work on hydropower development has been published in a number of journals and in African Water Histories: Transdisciplinary Discourses (North-West University, 2005).

Stacy E. Holden (Ph.D., History, 2005) is an Assistant Professor of Islamic Civilization in the History Department at Purdue University. While a grad student at Boston University, she had the opportunity to work and study in Mauritania, Mali, Tunisia, and Egypt. Her research interests, however, led her to Morocco, where she traced foodways in Fez in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is now working on a manuscript entled The Environment of Power: Famine and Authority in Modern Morocco. Professor Holden has published articles and commentaries not only on the history of Morocco, but also the present-day political situation in Mauritania, Iran and Iraq.    

Tom Johnson (long-time graduate student in history) has joined the cataloguing department at Mugar Library.

Israel Katoke (Ph.D. History, 1969) visited the African Studies Center for the first time in many years recently and shared the news that he is vice chancellor of the new University of Bukoba in Tanzania, which he is helping to develop.

Emmanuel Konde (Ph.D., history, 1991) is chair of the Department of History at Knoxville College in Tennessee.

Julie Livingston (MA, History, 1993) is Associate Professor of History and also teaches in the Institute of Health at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Her office is across the hall from Barbara Cooper's.

Jane Martin (Ph.D., History, and former outreach coordinator) has purchased her first home in a small town in Pennsylvania. Although Jane is retired from the African-American Institute, she is still busy working with the African art collection at Scranton's Everhart Museum, tutoring English, playing Bach on her grand piano, and traveling with friends.

Akin Ogundiran (Ph.D., Archaeology, 2000) is Associate Professor of History and director of African-New World Studies at Florida International University. He is an archaeologist and a cultural historian. He has conducted research in Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the United States. He is currently researching Oyo Imperialism in the Bight of Benin and Yoruba culture in the Atlantic world. His research has been funded by Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation-supported programs, among others. Author of several publications, his latest book (co-edited with Toyin Falola) is Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora (Indiana University Press, August 2007). He is the recipient of 2006 University of Texas Africanist Award for Research Excellence. 

William Oweke Ojwang (Ph.D., Biology, 2006) is a Senior Research Officer with the Kenja Marine and Fisheries Research Institute (KMFRI) based at Kisumu City, Kenya. He coordinates research activities in Lake Turkana, conducts research (fish biology and ecology) in Lake Victoria and leads an environmental awareness program in the Kenyan portion of Lake Victoria.

Jeanne Penvenne (Ph.D., History, 1982) is Associate Professor of History and Core Faculty in International Relations, Women's Studies and Africa in the New World Studies at Tufts University. Her book African Workers and Colonial Racism was a finalist for the 1994 Herskovits Award. Her field is urban and labor history of Mozambique and the former Portuguese African colonies. Her current research "Seeking Gendered Perspectives - Urbanization, Labor Migration and the Cashew-Shellers of Mozambique, 1945-1975" centers men's and women's experiences equally in Southern African urban migration analyses.

Jonathan Reynolds (Ph.D., History, 1995) teaches African history at Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights and has an active musical career on the side. Jonathan wrote many of the songs and played guitar, bass, or sang on most of the tracks on the 1996 CD "Original Sins" by Defenders of the Faith.

Jennifer Seif (MA, History) has taken up a new post with an NGO in Pretoria. She is now working for the IUCN (World Conservation Union) office in Pretoria, managing an independent program called "Fair Trade in Tourism in South Africa." She hopes some day to return to serious writing on her anthropology dissertation for the University of Chicago.

Michael Sheridan (Ph.D., Anthropology, 2001) is an Assistant Professor at Middlebury College in Vermont. He has published in American Anthropologist and the Journal of African History, and his co-edited volume on African sacred groves comes out in early 2008. He and his wife Kristina have two children, Gaia and Kieran.

Marc Sommers (Ph.D., Anthropology, 1994) is an Associate Research Professor of Humanitarian Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University and a Research Fellow at Boston University’s African Studies Center. He also works as an international consultant. Dr. Sommers is currently carrying out research on youth in Rwanda for the World Bank and the influence of terror war tactics, child soldiering and popular culture in Sierra Leone. His book, Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania, received the 2003 Margaret Mead Award.

Steven Thomson (Ph.D., Anthropology, 2006) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA.

E. Frances White (Ph.D., History) is Dean of the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Keep in touch!

If you change jobs, publish a book, move to Tibet, or have other life experiences you would like to share, please send your news to Anne Bellows (abellows@bu.edu) so that it can be included here. Please also let Anne know if you would like to have your e-mail or other address listed here; address information will not be shared without your explicit permission.