James Sweet
Faculty Director
Email: jhsweet@wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.2380
James H. Sweet is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests range widely across the history of Africa and the African diaspora. He is the author of two prize-winning books, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (2003) and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (2011). In addition to Diaspora’s Democracy, he is currently working on two other projects, one on a pirated slave ship in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, and another on the politics of interracial intimacy in twentieth-century South Africa.
James Delehanty
Associate Director
Email: jmdeleha@wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.4458
Delehanty serves as the main administrator of the program. He regularly teaches our introductory Africa course as well as other courses for the International Studies Major. He writes on Africa in his field of geography. Delehanty was trained at Minnesota (B.A. and Ph.D.) and Chicago (M.A.) in historical geography, cultural ecology, and migration and environmental change in Africa. He has spent about four years in Niger and two in Kenya and also has worked in Chad, Uganda, Senegal, and Kyrgyzstan.
Catherine A. Reiland
Assistant Director
Email: creiland@wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.4461
Reiland serves as the academic advisor and coordinator of the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship competition for African Studies. She also handles the communication and administrative management of events and programming. In July 2009 she led a group of 14 teachers from across the United States to Rwanda for 30 days with the support of the Fulbright-Hays Groups Projects Abroad, a grant of the United States Department of Education.
Before arriving at the African Studies Program Reiland completed her MA in Spring 2008 at New York University. While in New York she worked as an editorial assistant at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics e-misférica, an online trilingual peer-reviewed journal, and for NYU’s Humanities Initiative. Reiland is a photographer and her research interests include religious performance, tourist productions, memory, and visual culture.
Anne Waliaula
Outreach Coordinator
Email: awaliaula@wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.265.9151
Dr. Waliaula earned a Ph.D. in Social Studies and Global Education from The Ohio State University. After completing her Bachelor of Education in Linguistics and Literature in Kenya, she did her graduate studies at The Ohio State University where she obtained an MA in African American and African Studies and MA in Social Studies and Global Education. Her professional experience includes 17 years of teaching at different levels in Kenya and the United States. Prior to coming to UW-Madison, Waliaula taught Kiswahili and African literature at The Ohio State University at the Department of African American and African Studies. Dr. Waliaula’s research areas of interest include Social Studies, Global Education, Multicultural and African Studies.
Jeri Byrne
Financial Specialist
Email: glbyrne@africa.wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.4460
Bethany Wilinski
Publications Assistant
Email: publications@africa.wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.2493
Krista Duffy
Administrative Assistant
Email: asp@africa.wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.2380
Web and Media Assistant
Email: web@africa.wisc.edu
Telephone: 608.262.2380