2014 William Allen Brown Memorial Lecture

Imperial Shadows: Pilgrims, Migrants, and “French” Muslims in the Nilotic Sudan

Gregory Mann
Associate professor, Department of History
Columbia University

4:00pm
Thursday, April 10, 2014
Tripp Commons, Memorial Union
800 Langdon St.
Madison, WI 53706

Download Poster(pdf)

Speaker Bio

Gregory Mann, associate professor of history, Columbia University, is an historian of francophone West Africa. He is currently working on a book project entitled The End of the Road: Nongovernmentality in the West African Sahel. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Mali, the project analyzes the rise of novel forms of political rationality among governments and non-governmental organizations in the Sahel from 1946 to the late 1970s. His award-winning book Native Sons: West African Veterans and France in the 20th century was published by Duke University Press in 2006. Mann’s articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History and Politique Africaine, among other publications. His writing on contemporary West African politics has appeared in Foreign Policy, the Review of African Political Economy, and in various media outlets. He blogs periodically with the Africa Is a Country collective (Africasacountry.com). He earned his doctorate at Northwestern University and his B.A. at the University of Georgia.

About William Allen Brown

Gregory Mann will honor the life of Dr. William Allen Brown (1934-2007), a brilliant graduate student-scholar, teacher, and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In remembering him, his footprints on the sands of time will be intimately traced in globality. He graduated from Kentucky State College (now university; an HBCU) with Highest Honors of Distinction in History and French Literature (1959); to the Sorbonne Université-Paris, France (1959-1960), where he jumped to the head of his class with A’s; to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1960-1964); conducted fieldwork in French, Arabic, and Fulfulde in Islamic West Africa (1964-1969); awarded a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African history (1969). His first appointment was at Yale (1969-1970); second, Harvard University (1971-1974); and third, UW-Madison (1975-2005).