Speakers

Daniel Avorgbedor
Associate Professor, School of Music and Dept of African American & African Studies
Coordinator, Ethnomusicology Program, The Ohio State University
President, Midwest Chapter of Society for Ethnomusicology

Daniel Avorgbedor received his Ph.D. from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1986 and has since taught at the University of Ghana (Legon), Bretton Hall College (UK), and City College of New York. He served as editor of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 1990-1994 and his research and teaching specializations include methodological issues in studying the African diaspora; cross-cultural aesthetics; urban ethnomusicology; dialectics of musical, cultural, and political autonomies in contemporary church music in Africa; and social aggression and musical creativity in rural and urban Anlo-Ewe societies. He has contributed essays to Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1998), New Grove Dictionary of Music (2000), African Folklore: An Encyclopedia (2004), Shamanism: An Encyclopedia of World Beliefs, Practices, and Culture (ABC-CLIO, 2004), Ewe Handbook, Vol. 3 (2005).  He edited the collection essays, The Interrrelatedness of Music, Religion and Ritual in African Performance Practice (2003) and also guest-edited a special issue of World of Music on “Cross-Cultural Aesthetics” (2003). His essays appeared in Ethnomusicology, World Music, Oral Tradition, Research in African Literatures," Cahiers de musiques traditionnelles, etc. He is working on two book manuscripts on “haló performance and social aggression” and “Musical Traditions in Transition: The Urban Anlo-Ewe.” For details, http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/avorgbedor1/.

Kim D. Butler
Professor and Chair, Department of Africana Studies
Rutgers University

Butler received her Ph.D. in History from Johns Hopkins University in 1995. She is a historian specializing in African diaspora studies with a focus on Brazil and Latin America/Caribbean. Butler is the author of Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition Sao Paulo and Salvador (1998), winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association, and the Letitia Woods Brown Publication Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She has published numerous articles on Afro-Brazilian history and, more recently, diaspora theory. Her current work applies advances in diaspora studies to new interpretations of African diaspora history.

Judith Carney
Professor, Department of Geography
University of California-Los Angeles

Carney received her Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley in 1986.  She is a specialist in environment and development in West Africa and the African Diaspora. She is the recipient of various grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. She is also the author of Black Rice: The Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (2001), which won the Melville Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association in 2002 and the James M. Blaut Award from the Association of American Geographers in 2003.  She is currently completing a book on African environmental knowledge systems in the Americas.

Carolyn Cooper
Professor, Department of Literatures in English
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

Cooper received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She is an expert on popular culture, gender, and literature in the Caribbean. One of Jamaica's foremost cultural critics, she has hosted her own television talk show and is a frequent contributor to public debates on gender and culture in Jamaica. She is the author of a series of articles and book chapters, as well as of Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the "Vulgar" Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (1995) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (2004).

Grant Farred
Associate Professor, Department of Literature
Duke University

Farred received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1997. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Williams College. He is the author of Midfielder's Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (1999) and What's My Name? Organic and Vernacular Intellectuals (2003). He is the editor of Rethinking C.L.R James (1966). His forthcoming projects include The Phantom Calls: Race and Globalization in the NBA (2006) and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (2007).

Robert Fatton, Jr.
Julia A. Cooper Professor, Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of  Virginia

Fatton received his Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana in 1981. He specializes in comparative governments with an emphasis on African Studies and the third world. He has published numerous articles on politics in Africa and the Diaspora. He is also the author of Black Consciousness in South Africa: The Dialectics of Ideological Resistance to White Supremacy (1986), The Making of a Liberal Democracy: Senegal?s Passive Revolution, 1975-1985 (1987), Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa (2002), and Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (2002). He has served as guest editor of the journal, Wadabagei, and co-edited an issue of the Journal of Haitian Studies with Patrick Bellegarde-Smith. Most recently he co-edited with R.K. Ramazani The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World (2004). He is currently working on a new book tentatively titled The Authoritarian Habitus which seeks to explain the historical and material roots of despotic regimes in Haiti. 

Roquinaldo Ferreira
Assistant Professor, Department of History
University of Virginia

Ferreira received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2003 where he wrote his dissertation on “Transforming Atlantic Slaving: Trade, Warfare and Territorial Control in Angola, 1650-1800.”  Ferreira is an expert on early Africa and colonial Brazilian history.  Widely acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on Angolan archives, Ferreira has served as a research assistant on the updated CD ROM, “The Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Enlarged Dataset.”  He has also published numerous articles on slavery, the slave trade, and the African diaspora.  Currently, he is a fellow at the WEB DuBois Institute and the David Rockefeller Center at Harvard.

Flávio dos Santos Gomes
Professor, Department of History
Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Gomes received his Ph.D. from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas.  He has edited collections and published books and articles on slavery and post-emancipation society in Brazil, among them: Histórias de quilombolas (1995); Liberdade por um fio (com João José, 1996); Nas terras do Cabo Norte (1999); Senhores do Rio (com Mary Del Priore, 2003); Experiências atlânticas (2003).  Most recently, he has published a work on runaway slave communities in Brazil, particularly in Amazônia and Maranhão, where African and Indigenous peoples came together to resist slavery and Portuguese colonization.  The book is entitled, A hidra e os pântanos - Mocambos, Quilombos e comunidades de fugitivos no Brasil (séculos XVII-XIX).

Paget Henry
Professor, Department of Sociology and Africana Studies
Brown University

Henry received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1976.  His specializations are Dependency Theory, Caribbean Political Economy, Sociology of Religion, Sociology of Art and Literature, Africana Philosophy and Religion, Race and Ethnic Relations, Poststructuralism, and Critical Theory. He has served on the faculties of SUNY-Stony Brook, the University of the West Indies (Antigua) and the University of Virginia. He is the author of Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (2000), Peripheral Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Antigua (Transaction Books, 1985), and co-editor of C.L.R. James's Caribbean (1992) and New Caribbean: Decolonization, Democracy, and Development (1983).  Henry has also published more than fifty articles, essays, and reviews.

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe
Visiting Scholar, Cultural Anthropology Department
Duke University

Jayne Ifekwunigwe received a Joint Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley/San Francisco in 1993. She is formerly Reader in Anthropology at the University of East London (UK). Her scholarly interests include both comparative 'mixed race' identities and the gendered politics of African diasporic formations. Ifekwunigwe's work utilizes critical theory and visual/ethnographic methodologies, straddles the fields of anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies and is based on ethnographic research in the United States, Europe, and South Africa. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, as well as of Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of 'Race', Nation and Gender (1999) and the edited 'Mixed Race' Studies: A Reader (2004). She is working on a new book project provisionally entitled Out of Africa ("By Any Means Necessary"): Recent Clandestine West African Migrations and the Gendered Politics of Survival, which seeks to resituate these contemporary migration processes within the African Diaspora paradigm and to force a reassessment of what constitutes volition and victimization. She was recently elected to the Executive Board of ASWAD (Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora).

F. Abiola Irele
Visiting Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literature and
Afro-American Studies, Harvard University

Irele received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) in 1966.  He has served on the faculties at the University of Ibadan, the University of Lagos, the University of Ghana, Legon, the University of Ifé, and Ohio State University.  He specializes in Black African and Caribbean literature in English and French, with strong interests in contemporary thought in francophone Africa, within the context of black intellectual history. In 2000, he was the recipient of a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research project on "Southern African Praise Poetry." Professor Irele's publications include an annotated edition of Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977), a collection of critical essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (1981, reprinted 1990) an annotated edition of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1994; second edition 1999). A second collection of his essays entitled The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, was published in 2001. He is co-editor, with Simon Gikandi, of the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature published in 2 volumes in 2004. He is a contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and general editor of the series "Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature." From 1992 to 2003, he served as Editor of the journal Research in African Literatures. He is currently editing a collective volume on the African novel for Cambridge University Press.

Fatimah Jackson
Professor, Department of Applied Biological Anthropology
University of Maryland

Jackson received her Ph.D. from Cornell.  She is an expert on the biohistory of African peoples and their descendants in the diaspora.  She is widely recognized for her stress on interdisciplinary and interactive approaches to scientific research.  During the 1990s, she was coordinator for genetics research on the African Burial Ground Project in New York City.  In 2002, she co-founded the first human DNA bank in Africa (based at the University of Yaounde I in Cameroon) with the aim of changing the way that anthropological genetic research is done on the African continent (moving away from the colonial approach), enhancing local infrastructure and expertise, and dramatically improving the potential for scientific understanding of the interactions of genotypes and environmental factors in producing specific phenotypes (by providing a local context for data analysis and interpretation). With the cooperation of local scientists, the project continue to amass a large and diverse database of African and non-African genotypes which is unique in its ethnographic detail. This research effort will upgrade the quality of genetic data on Africans (and its interpretation) by placing the molecular information within a sophisticated anthropological context.  Jackson has published more than 30 articles in a variety of refereed journals including Human Biology, American Anthropologist, Annual Review of Anthropology, Journal of Black Studies, American Journal of Human Biology, Seton Hall Law Review, and the British Medical Bulletin.  Most recently, she appeared in the BBC documentary, "Motherland: A Genetic Journey," chronicling the search by three Afro-Britains in their search for their genetic roots in Africa.

Stanlie M. James
Professor and Chair, Department of Afro-American Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison

James received her Ph.D. from the Graduate School of International Studies, University of Denver in 1989.  She specializes in the study of Black Feminisms and Women's International Human Rights.  She has recently co-edited an anthology with Claire Robertson entitled Genital Cutting and Transnational Sisterhood: Disputing U.S. Polemics (2002), winner of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association’s 2003 Susan Koppelman Award for excellence in feminist editing. She is the also the co-editor of Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Feminism (1993) with Abena Busia. Her publications have appeared in Women's Studies International Forum, Women in Politics, Gender and Society, Journal of American History, Africa Today, Women and Politics, and the Journal of African Politics.

Biodun Jeyifo
Professor, Department of English
Cornell University

Jeyifo received his Ph.D. from New York University in 1975. He has taught at universities in Nigeria, Germany, and in the United States at Oberlin and Harvard. He specializes on African and African diaspora literatures, Marxist cultural theory and colonial and postcolonial studies. In addition to several articles and book chapters, he is the author of Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism (2003), The Truthful Lie: Essays in a Sociology of African Drama (1985), The Yoruba Popular Travelling Theatre of Nigeria (1984), and editor of Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture by Wole Soyinka (1993), Perspectives on Wole Soyinka: Freedom and Complexity (2001), and Modern African Drama Norton Critical Editions (2002). His current projects include a monograph on the drama of Derek Walcott, a collection of essays titled Arrested Decolonization and Postcolonial Studies, and the a two-volume study of the colonial foundations and legacies of modernity, Modernity from Below: 1: The Civilizing Process and the Civilizing Mission, and 2: Late Modernity and the Impossible Project of 'Civilizing' Accumulation.

Xolela Mangcu
Fellow, University of the Witwatersrand,
Public Intellectual Life Project, Johannesburg, South Africa

Mangcu received his Ph.D. in City Planning from Cornell University.  He has taught urban studies at the University of Maryland (College Park), worked as a specialist for the Development Bank of Southern Africa, and served as a consultant for numerous international and national development agencies including the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, ABT Associates, and the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund.  He is also the former Executive Director of the Steve Biko Foundation.  One of South Africa’s foremost public intellectuals, Mangcu is a regular political commentator and has been featured on the South African Broadcasting Corporation, E-TV, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and CNN.  He also has a regular newspaper column with the Johannesburg-based Business Day.

Moyo Okediji
Associate Professor, Chair, Art History Program
University of Colorado, School of Health Sciences, Denver
Consulting Curator, African, African American, and Oceanic Arts, Denver Art Museum

Okediji received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He is an expert on the arts of Africa and the African diaspora. As a working artist, curator, and scholar, Okediji has made a range of contributions to the art world. His art has been shown in galleries and museums around the world. Samples of his work can be found at: http://www.africaresource.com/exh/okediji/index1.htm & http://www.ackland.org/art/exhibitions/transatlantic/okediji.htm. Okediji's books include African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art (2002) and The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art (2003). He is also the author of numerous book chapters and essays.

Jacob Olupona
Professor, Department African-American and African Studies
University of California-Davis

Olupona received his Ph.D. in Comparative Religion from Boston University.  His research interests include African Traditional Religions, Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity, African Christianity and African Religion in the New World.  Olupona has served as the president of the African Association for the Study of Religions and he has chaired the American Academy of Religion’s Committee on International Connections.  He is the recipient of various grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Olupona is the author/editor of over a half dozen books, including African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions (2001) and Beyond Primitivism: Indigenous Religious Traditions and Modernity (2004).  He is currently editing a volume on Yoruba religious culture in the Americas.

Richard Price
Professor of American Studies, Anthropology and History
College of William and Mary

Price received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 1970. He has spent much of his career studying Maroons throughout the Americas focusing on ethnographic history and human rights. He is the author of Alabi’s World (1990) for which he won the Albert J. Beveridge Award, the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship and the J.I. Staley Prize in Anthropology. He also co-wrote The Birth of African-American Culture with Sidney Mintz (1992) and The Roots of Roots, Or, How Afro-American Anthropology Got its Start with Sally Price (2003). He has received numerous grants and fellowships including a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant (2003) and most recently a National Science Foundation Research Grant (2005-2007). He has published numerous articles on Caribbean art, culture and history. Most recently he has collaborated on a book with Sally Price, Romare Bearden: The Caribbean Dimension (2005). His other forthcoming work probes the origins and on-going development of African-American religions.

T. Douglas Price
Weinstein Professor, European Archaeology
Director, Laboratory for Archaeological Chemistry
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Price received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1975. His interests include European prehistory, archaeological chemistry, hunter-gathers and migration. He is the author of Excavations at Smakkerup Hus (2005). He has also published articles in edited volumes and scholarly journals including "Conquerors, Conquered and Slaves: Bioarchaeological Evidence of the Early Colonial Inhabitants of Campeche, Mexico" in Los Investigadores de la Cultura Maya XIII. Recently, he co-authored with Vera Tiesler and James Burton, "Early African Diaspora in Colonial Campeche, Mexico: Strontium Isotopic Evidence" in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (in press). An article about his work can be found at: http://www.news.wisc.edu/12076.html.

Sandra L. Richards
Professor, Theatre
Northwestern University

Richards received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.  Her research and teaching interests center on American Drama, African-American and African theatres, and black feminist theories.  She has taught dramatic literature and directed African-American, Caribbean, and African plays at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, Northwestern University, and the University of Benin (Nigeria), where she was a Fulbright lecturer from 1983 to 1985.  She is the author of Ancient Songs Set Ablaze: The Theatre of Femi Osofisan (1997).  She also has published articles on such African-American playwrights as Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Nigerian dramatists Wole Soyinka, Bode Sowande, Zulu Sofola.  Currently, she is researching issues of cultural tourism to slave sites throughout the black Atlantic.

Theresa A. Singleton
Professor, Department of Anthropology
Syracuse University

Singleton received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1980. Her areas of interest include historical archaeology, African Diasporas, museums, North America and the Caribbean. She is particularly interested in comparative studies of slave societies in the Americas. She has conducted research, contributed to exhibitions and published on various aspects of African-American life in the United States. Her publications include two edited volumes on the archaeology of the African-Diaspora: The Archaeology of Slavery and Plantation Life (Academic Press, 1985) and I, Too, Am America: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life (University Press of Virginia, 1999) as well as numerous articles. Singleton is currently directing a research project in Cuba that involves excavation of a coffee plantation historically known as Santa Ana de Viajacas and historical research of coffee plantations in the same jurisdiction.

Olufemi Taiwo
Professor, Department of Philosophy
Seattle University

Taiwo received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1986. He taught at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ife Ife, Nigeria, from 1986 to 1990 and at Loyola University Chicago from 1991 to 2000. His areas of specialization include Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy. He is Director of the Global African Studies Program at Seattle University. Taiwo is the author of Legal Naturalism: A Marxist Theory of Law (Cornell University Press, 1996), as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. He is Co-Editor of West Africa Review (westafricareview.com), and is on the editorial board of The Journal on African Philosophy. He is currently working on a collaborative project, funded by the Getty Foundation, on Yoruba Art and Aesthetics.