UC African Studies MRG

Members

C0-Directors:

Peter J. Bloom: Specializing in French and Francophone cinema and society, his interests range from the history of film technologies, narratives of body techniques, avant-garde and experimental movements, to contemporary film and media in Europe and Africa. His ongoing research examines the relationship between colonial media, the history of ethnographic film, and pre-cinema. He has presented his work internationally, curated film programs, and published more than a dozen articles on colonial cinema, early hygiene films, francophone African cinema, and the history of French anthropology in French and English. He is co-editing a volume entitled Frenchness and the African Diaspora (forthcoming, Indiana University Press) related to the 2005 disturbances in France, and his monograph French Colonial Documentary: Mythologies of Humanitarianism (2008) has been published by University of Minnesota Press.

Stephan Miescher: Focusing on Ghana, Miescher specializes in the 19th and 20th century social history of West Africa, colonialism, gender and masculinity, oral historiography. He is the author of Making Men in Ghana (2005), , and co-editor, with Catherine Cole and Takyiwaa Manuh, Africa After Gender (2007), both published by Indiana University Press.

UC Faculty Advisory Board:

Moradewun Adejunmbobi

Moradewun Adejunmobi is a professor in the African American and African Studies Program. She is also an affiliated professor with the Comparative Literature Program, the Linguistics Graduate Group, and the Film and Media Program. She is the author of JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar (1996), and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa (2004). Her current interests include work on literacy and popular culture in West Africa, multilingualism and intercultural communication in contemporary Africa, and Nigerian video film.

Andrew Apter

Andrew Apter is Professor of History and Anthropology at UCLA, where he directs the James S. Coleman African Studies Center. His work focuses on West African and African diasporic cultures, ritual, memory, and indigenous knowledge as well as colonial culture, commodity fetishism, economic development and state spectacle. His recent books The Pan- African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (2005), which was awarded the 2007 Amaury Talbot Prize for the best book in African anthropology and by the Royal Anthropological institute of Great Britain and Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa (2007) were published by the University of Chicago Press. His latest research project, “Living in Limbo: The African Refugees Documentation Project,” focuses on witchcraft and repatriation among Congolese refugees in Zambia.

Ruby Bell – Gam

Ruby A. Bell-Gam is Librarian for African Studies & International Development Studies Charles E. Young Research Library at UCLA. Her professionally interests include multimedia information access, management and preservation; International partnerships for library and archives development in Africa. She is co-author of Nigeria, rev. ed. (Clio, 1999) an Honorable Mention, Conover-Porter Award, 2002, and a contributor, to Global Voices, Global Visions: A Core Collection of Multicultural Books (Bowker, 1995). Ruby is also an accomplished filmmaker, whose works include My Child…Their Child, which won the UCLA Jim Morrison Award (1983) and, with David Iyam, Inyono (The Cult) (1985).

Victoria Bernal

Victoria Bernal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC, Irvine. Her research interests include a range of issues relating to gender, migration, states, development, transnationalism, cyberspace, and Islam. She has carried out ethnographic research in Eritrea, Tanzania, and the Sudan. She is currently writing a book on the politics of diaspora and cyberspace. The project analyzes the Eritrean diaspora’s use of cyberspace to participate in Eritrean politics. It brings into focus the emerging politics of sovereignty and citizenship associated with population movements, de-territorialized identities, and new media. Bernal analyzes cyberspace as a site of cultural production and political expression where new publics and new public spheres are created, struggles over meanings and power are staged, and political action is mobilized. Bernal is also engaged in an interdisciplinary project, with Inderpal Grewal in Women’s Studies at UCI, focused on the nature and impact of women’s NGOs in both the Global North and the Global South in relation to questions of democratization, development, humanitarianism, neo-liberal restructuring, state power, and transnational linkages. A co-edited anthology tentatively titled “The NGO Boom: Critical Feminist Perspectives” is in the works.

Marla Berns

Marla C. Berns is the Director of the Fowler Museum at UCLA and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Art History Department at UCLA. From 1991 to 2001 she was Director of the University Art Museum, UCSB. Her research and writing have focused on women’s arts in Northeastern Nigeria – which include ceramics, decorated gourds and programs of body scarification – and on the historical and ritual importance of figurative ceramic vessels. She has been involved in many exhibitions on wide range of topics, including a number devoted to her specialty, African art. She is currently co-curator of a major exhibition on the arts of the Benue River Valley, Nigeria, being produced in association with the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, and scheduled to premiere at the Fowler in February 2011. The scholarly publication accompanying the exhibition is being edited jointly with Richard Fardon and Sidney Kasfir. Berns is on the editorial board of the journal African Arts and is on the Board of Governors of UCHRI.

Elisabeth Cameron
	Elisabeth L. Cameron is Associate Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. She has worked on play, ritual, visual culture, gender, and iconoclasm in African art and has published widely in many journals and books focusing on African art.

Catherine Cole

Catherine Cole is Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on African theater, critical theory, field methods, gender, and performance studies. She is the author of Ghana’s Concert Party Theater (2001) and co-editor of Africa After Gender? (2007). Her forthcoming book States of Transition: Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission goes to press in Fall 2008.

Ivan Evans

Ivan Evans is Associate Professor of Sociology at UC San Diego. His research and teaching focus on change in modern South Africa, race and ethnicity, social movements, and the sociology of intellectuals. His current research focuses on the impact of global climate change and water management in southern Africa. His Bureaucracy and Race: Native Administration in South Africa (1997) was published by the University of California Press. Cultures of Violence: Lynching and Racial Killing in South Africa and the American South (2008) was published by Manchester University Press.

David Theo Goldberg

David Theo Goldberg is the Director of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and Professor in Comparative Literature, and n Criminology, and Law and Society at UC Irvine. His work has focused on a range of issues, from political theory, race and race theory, ethics and law, to critical theory, cultural studies, and, most recently, also the digital humanities. His many published works include The Threat of Race: Reflections on Racial Neoliberalism (2008) and The Racial State (2002).

Percy Hintzen

Percy C. Hintzen is Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hintzen received his Ph.D. in political sociology and comparative social change from Yale University in 1981. He has taught at Yale as well as the University of Guyana. At Berkeley, Professor Hintzen teaches postcolonial studies, Caribbean political economy, and diaspora studies; his research interests include Creole nationalism and Black diasporic identity in the United States. Professor Hintzen is the author of Problematizing Blackness: Self-Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States (Routledge, 2003) and West Indians in the West: Self Representations in a Migrant Community (NYU, 2001).

Bennetta Jules-Rosette

Bennetta Jules-Rosette is Professor of Sociology and Director of the African and African-American Studies Research Project at UC San Diego. Her work addresses contemporary African art and literature, semiotic studies of Black Paris, religious discourse, and new technologies in Africa. She has conducted research in France, Congo (DRC), Zambia, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Sénégal, and has also published eight books and numerous articles. Her recent Josephine Baker in Art and Life: The Icon and the Image (2007) was published by University of Illinois Press.

Ed Keller

Edmond J. Keller is professor and chair of political science, Director of the UCLA Globalization Research Center-Africa and former Director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at the University of California-Los Angeles. He specializes in comparative politics with an emphasis on Africa. Keller received his B.A. in Government from Louisiana State University in New Orleans, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has taught at Indiana University, Dartmouth College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Xavier University (New Orleans), and the University of California-Santa Barbara. Keller has been a visiting research scholar at the Institute for Development Studies (Nairobi, Kenya), the Bureau of Educational Research (Nairobi), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, the Africa Institute of South Africa, and the University of California-Berkeley Institute for International Studies. Also, he has consulted widely on issues relating to African Development and public policy, and, more recently, on the process of political transitions in Africa, and on African regional security issues.He has also served as Editor of the Journal of African Policy Studies, as treasurer for the North American Chapter of the African Journal of Political Science, and as vice president and president of the African Studies Association.Keller is the author of two monographs: Education, Manpower and Development: The Impact of Educational Policy in Kenya (1980) and Revolutionary Ethiopia: From Empire to People’s Republic (1988). Professor Keller has also written more than 50 articles on African and African American politics, and has co-edited three books: Afro-marxist Regimes: Ideology and Public Policy (with Donald Rothchild, 1987); South Africa in Southern Africa: Domestic Change and International Conflict (with Louis Picard, 1989), and Africa in the New International Order: Rethinking State Sovereignty and Regional Security (with Donald Rothchild, 1996). Presently Keller’s main research are on issues of political transitions in Africa, cultural pluralism and nationalism, and conflict and conflict management in Africa.

Benjamin Lawrence

Benjamin N. Lawrance is Assistant Professor of African History at UC Davis. Lawrance grew up in Australia and the U.K. He studied Ancient European history at London University, and African history at Stanford University under the guidance of Richard Roberts. His recent book, Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’: Periurban Colonialism in Togo’s Eweland, 1900-1960 explores the social antecedents to the nationalism of the Ewe-speaking peoples of British and French-mandated Togoland. His research interests include West Africa, the African slave trade, comparative and contemporary slavery, child trafficking, and human rights violations, asylum and immigration and other social justice issues, Pan-Africanism, health, borderlands studies, oral history and methodologies of orality. He has edited two volumes; the first with Richard Roberts and Emily Osborn on the role of intermediaries in the construction of African colonial law entitled Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa; and the second entitled The Ewe of Togo and Benin. Professor Lawrance is a legal consultant on the contemporary political climate in Togo, Ghana and Benin. He regularly serves as an expert witness for law firms representing asylum-seekers in US, UK, Canadian and European courts. In his spare time, he enjoys skiing, cycling, hiking, travel, scrabble, opera and building water boreholes <> in rural villages in Togo, Ghana and Benin. If you are interested in supporting these development projects, please contact him by email.

Sylvester Ogbechie

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara, and author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (University of Rochester Press, 2008). He specializes in classical, modern, and contemporary African and African Diaspora arts, visual culture, and knowledge systems theory. Ogbechie is the Founder and Director of Aachron Knowledge Systems, which includes the publishing imprint Aachron Editions and Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture.

Dominic Thomas

Dominic Thomas chairs the departments of French and Francophone Studies and Italian at UCLA. His teaching and research interests include African literature, immigration and racism in France, and contemporary French politics. His Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (2002) and Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (2007) were published by Indiana University Press.

UC Faculty:

UC Berkeley

Jenna Burrell Informatics

Catherine M. Cole Performance Studies

Marine Ferme Anthropology

Wayne M. Getz Enviromental Science, Policy, and Management

Percy C. Hintzen African/African-American Studies (Director)

Donald Moore Anthropology

G. Ugo Nwokeji African-American Studies

Abena Dove Osseo-Asare History

Martha Saavedra Center for African Studies (Associate Director)

Ann Swidler Sociology