African Studies Faculty
Core faculty in African Studies:
1-Barbara Harlow
Barbara Harlow is the Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor of English Literatures in the Department of English at The University of Texas at Austin and has also taught at the American University in Cairo (1977-83 and again in 2006-7 as Visiting Professor and Chair of English and Comparative Literature), University College Galway (1992), University of Minnesota Twin Cities (1994), University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (1998) and University of Natal in Durban (2002). She is the author of Resistance Literature (1986), Barred: Women, Writing, and Political Detention (1992), After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing (1996), and co-editor with Mia Carter of Imperialism and Orientalism: A Documentary Sourcebook (1999) and Archives of Empire: Vol 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal and Vol 11, The Scramble for Africa (2003). She is currently working on an intellectual bio-biography of the South African activist, Ruth First. Her teaching and research interests include “imperialism and orientalism” and “literature and human rights/social justice.”
Courses:
"Orientalism and Imperialism"
"The Scramble for Africa"
"Literature and Human Rights"
"Literature and Social Justice"
Ethnic and Third World Literatures graduate programs in the Department of English, including the annual Sequels Symposium in the spring of each year.
2- Niyi Afolabi
Teaches Lusophone African and African Diaspora Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese as well as the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a doctorate in Portuguese and Africana Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Golden Cage: Regeneration in Lusophone African Literature and Culture, editor of Marvels of the African World: African Cultural Patrimony, New World Connections and Identities, and co-editor of The Afro-Brazilian Mind / A Mente Afro-Brasileira: Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literary and Cultural Criticism. His current research project focuses on the Brazilian manifestation of Yoruba identity.
Courses:
Second Year Yoruba I
Second Year Yoruba II
Lusophone Africa Literature(s) & Culture(s)
Afro-Luso-Brazilian Worlds
Yoruba Mythologies/Cosmologies
Yoruba (Diaspora) Literature and Film
Afro-Brazilian Diaspora
Africana Autobiographies
3- Jossianna Arroyo Martínez
Jossianna Arroyo Martínez is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Center for African and African American Studies. Her areas of specialization are centered on Afro Diaspora Studies in the Spanish Caribbean and Brazil, particularly the connection between literature, sociology and ethnography. She studies African religions in the diaspora, performance, and the politics of culture, representation and political agency of Afrodescendants in the Americas. She has published "Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil" (Pittsburgh: Iberoamericana, 2003) and is currently finishing her second book entitled, "Fin de siglo: Secrecy and Technologies of the Word in Caribbean Freemasonry”
FOR WCAAAS:
Coordinated in March of 2009 the Performance in Africa and the African Diasporas (along with Prof. Christen Smith); consultant for the 2009 Yoruba Da;. Coordination of WCAAAS Diaspora Talk guest, Frieda Ekotto- Cameroonian writer and Associate Professor of Francophone Studies at the Department of Romance Languages and WCAAAS, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
FOR LILLAS (Latin American Studies):
Organized the Afro-Latin American research cluster at LILLAS (Latin American Studies) a group of faculty members and graduate students. The main goal of the Afro-Descendant Studies cluster is to establish a critical dialogue in social, cultural and political terms of the main issues which affect the Afro-descendant populations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Since these issues pertain to forms of inequality, citizenship, autonomy, lands,
human-sexual rights, culture and social justice; we do depart from an interdisciplinary perspective which has established and wants to continue to establish collaborative research with other clusters at LILLAS, WCAAAS and the university community in general. Served as President the first year (2007-2008).
Courses:
"African Diasporas in the Americas" (Graduate and undergraduate level)
"African Diasporas in Latin America" (Graduate and undergraduate level)
"Afro-Caribbean Diasporas"-Graduate seminar
4- Catherine Boone
Catherine Boone specializes in comparative politics, with an emphasis on theories of political economy and economic development. She has conducted research on industrial, commercial, and land tenure policies in West Africa, where her work has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the World Bank, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her current research focuses on territorial politics and rural property rights in contemporary Africa, with particular emphasis on the role of property rights in shaping electoral and political dynamics. She teaches courses on globalization, comparative political economy, qualitative research methods in Political Science, and African politics.
Professor Boone has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA), well as of review boards for the National Science Foundation, Fulbright, and the Social Science Research Council. She is a member of the Africa Regional Advisory Panel of the Social Science Research Council; Secretary of the African Politics Conference Group, an APSA-affiliated research network; Vice Chair of APSA’s Comparative Democratization Section; and an elected member of the APSA Executive Council (2005-7 term). Professor Boone was also Treasurer, Board Member, and President of the West Africa Research Association (2005 -6), which overseas the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal.
She has been Visiting Fulbright Professor, Beijing Foreign Studies University, People’s Republic of China; Visiting Professor and Researcher, Centro de Investigación y Docencias Economicas (CIDE), Mexico City, Mexico; Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Centre Ivoirien de Recherche Economique et Sociale, Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire; and Visiting Researcher at the Centre Des Etudes Superieures en Gestion, Dakar, Senegal.
Professor Boone is author of Political Topographies of the African State: Rural Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge, 2003), which was winner of the Society for Comparative Research Mattei Dogan Award in 2005, as well as a finalist for the African Studies Association Herskovitz award in 2004, and a runner-up for the Comparative Politics section of the American Political Science Association’s Luebbert Award in 2004. Professor Boone is also author of Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal, 1930 -1985 (Cambridge, 1992), a finalist for the Herskovitz award in 1993. She is also the author of articles on economic development, institutional reform, HIV/AIDS, and political transitions that have appeared in Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Development Studies, World Development, African Economic History, Africa Today, American Anthropologist, Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, and the Journal of Modern African Studies.
Prof. Boone received her B.A. from the University of California at San Diego and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
"Africa's New Territorial Politics: Regionalism and the Open Economy in Cote d'Ivoire," African Studies Review, April 2007
"Property and Constitutional Order: Land Tenure Reform and the Future of the African State," African Affairs, 2007
Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice, Cambridge University Press, 2003
Courses:
Politics in AfricanGlobal Change, Regional Responses: Comparative Responses to GlobalizationModern Africa: Trials of the Nation State (grad. seminar)Comparative Political Economy (grad. seminar)
Research Colloquium in Political Science (grad. seminar)
5- James Wilson
Historian of Kenya Political history; James Wilson has been doing research in Kenya to conduct more research for his upcoming book. James Wilson has organized and co-coordinated the “World AIDS Day Conference” with Neville Hoad (English and Women's and Gender Studies)
6- Veit Erlmann
Veit Erlmann is the holder of the Endowed Chair in Music History. Born in Germany, he studied musicology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy in Berlin and Cologne. He has done fieldwork in several African countries such as Cameroon, Niger, Ghana, South Africa and Lesotho. Previous appointments include the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, the University of Chicago and the Free University of Berlin. Among his most recent publications are African Stars. Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago, 1991) and Nightsong. Performance, Power and Practice in South Africa (Chicago, 1996), and Music, Modernity, and the Global Imagination. South Africa and the West (New York, 1999) which was awarded the Alan P.Merriam Prize in 2000. Erlmann’s area specialization is in West, Central and Southern Africa, and Indonesia. His is currently at work on a “Cultural History of the Ear.”
Courses
Music and Popular Culture in South Africa
Music of South Africa
7- Toyin Falola
Toyin Falola, Ph.D., Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria is a Distinguished Teaching Professor and the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous books, including Violence in Nigeria: The Crisis of Religious Politics and Secular Ideologies and Nationalism and African Intellectuals, both from the University of Rochester Press. He is the co-editor of the Journal of African Economic History, Series Editor of Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora, Series Editor of the Culture and Customs of Africa by Greenwood Press, and Series Editor of Classic Authors and Texts on Africa by Africa World Press.
He has received various awards and honors, including the Jean Holloway Award for Teaching Excellence, The Texas Exes Teaching Award, the Chancellor's Council Outstanding Teaching Award, the Cecil B Currey Award for his book, Economic Reforms and Modernization in Nigeria. He is the 2006 recipient of the Felix E. Udogu Africa Award, the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award, the 2007 Amistad Award, and the 2007 SIRAS Award for Outstanding Contribution to African Studies. For his distinguished contribution to the study of Africa, his students and colleagues have presented him with a set of three Festschriften, two edited by Adebayo Oyebade, The Transformation of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola and The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola, and one by Akin Ogundiran, Precolonial Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola His memoir, A Mouth Sweeter Than Salt, captures his childhood and received various awards. He has an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University, USA.
http://www.toyinfalola.com/
www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa
http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs
http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Courses:
Introduction to Africa
USA and Africa
Epistemologies of Black Studies
Modern Africa
Toyin Falola as organized and coordinated the Africa Distinguished Lecture Series and the Annual Conference on Africa
8- Hélène Tissières
Hélène Tissières is Assistant Professor of Francophone African Literatures in the Department of French and Italian. Her book Écritures en transhumance entre Maghreb et Afrique subsaharienne which was published by L’Harmattan in 2007 investigates several innovative circulations: geographic, between North and sub-Saharan Africa; cultural, between orality and writing; aesthetic, between literature and painting. In 2003 she received a Fulbright research / lecturer grant and taught for nearly two years at the University Cheick Anta Diop in Dakar. She also holds a degree in painting and her interests in Visual Arts have brought her to closely follow the Dakar biennial on which she has published several articles in Éthiopiques, Research in African Literatures and was the editor of a special issue of Présence Francophone on the contemporary Senegalese art scene, which appeared in 2008. She has published articles on African writers, filmmakers and artists and is presently working on her second book examining the works of key Senegalese figures.
Courses:
“Contemporary French and African Literatures: Self/Otherness”. This course examines in translation contemporary literary texts around the notion of otherness and identity. Course taught in English. (undergraduate)
“Contemporary North and sub-Saharan ‘Francophone’ African Literatures”. This course analyzes themes treated by the authors such as exile, alienation, disillusion and role of women. A wide selection of films and theoretical readings are included to enrich discussions. Course taught in English. (undergraduate)
“African ‘Francophone’ Literatures: Rise of Pan-African Struggles”. Examining how writers denounce colonial rule and the many injustices. Course taught in French. (undergraduate)
“African Literatures, Visual Images and Music: Intertwinements of Art Forms”. Examines literary texts written in French from North and sub-Saharan African in order to understand how the arts are closely intertwined throughout the continent. Writers become musicians, filmmakers, or incorporate in their work theatrical devices, referring to painting and music to construct their narratives. (undergraduate)
“Contemporary ‘Francophone’ African Literatures”. This course examines fragmented works from both the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, written mainly during the “postcolonial” period. Are analyzed in the texts the inscription of the political situation as well as rituals, divination systems, orality, signs, etc. Several African films are seen to further engage in themes treated. (graduate)
“Caribbean and African ‘Francophone’ Literatures: Transatlantic Links and Differences.” Literary texts are discussed with many theoretical approaches (Césaire, Glissant, Confiant, etc.) and several films are viewed. (graduate)
“North and sub-Saharan Theatre and Music Developments”. The course looks at the development of theatre and to a lesser extent music, analyzing as well films influenced by theatre. (graduate)
“North and sub-Saharan Autobiography/Novel”. This course examines works, which are considered to be autobiographical from the colonial and the postcolonial period, looking at the difficulty of categorizing such texts. (graduate)
“(Re)Presentation of Women through Contemporary African Works”. This course looks at text written in English and French as well as many films to discuss the multiplicity of positions found on the role of women. (gradaute)
9- Joni Jones
Omi Oshun Joni L. Jones, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre and Dance, and Associate Director of the Center for African and African-American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is an artist/scholar who is currently engaged in performance ethnography around the Yoruba divinity Osun, and is writing a collaborative ethnography on the use of a jazz aesthetic in theatre. While on a Fulbright Fellowship in Nigeria (1997-98), Dr. Jones taught at Obafemi Awolowo University and contributed Theatre for Social Change workshops for the Forum on Governance and Democracy in Ile-Ife. Her articles on performance and identity have appeared in Text and Performance Quarterly, The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and Black Theatre News. Her performance ethnography includes Searching for Osun, sista docta, and Broken Circles: A Journey Through Africa and the Self. She is the founder of The Austin Project—a collaboration of women of color artists, scholars, and activists who use art for re-imagining society, and a regular participant with the Center for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC).
Courses"
Performing Race
Yoruba Performance Traditions
African American Theatre History
Omi Osun Joni L. Jones has organized and coordinated the following events:
African Feminisms Seminar
Each spring leading African Feminist theorists gather to discuss the complexities of feminist conceptualizations around the world. Previous participants have included Oyeronke Oyewumi, Obioma Nnaemeka, Teresa Washington, Omofolabo Ajayi-Soyinka, Freida Ekotto.
Yoruba Day
The annual Yoruba Day celebration is an opportunity to learn Yoruba culture, politics, and cosmology through art, music, food, and clothing, and for students in Yoruba classes to share their work.
10- Fehintola Mosadomi
Fehintola Mosadomi holds a Ph.D from Tulane University with a specialization in Yoruba phonology. She also earned two Masters, one in languages and literature and the other in linguistics. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a poet and linguist. Her interests include poetry in French, English and Yoruba, as well as studies in Yoruba language and linguistics, French language and literature (including Francophone), Creole studies, language pedagogy, language and power, and language and gender. She has won numerous awards including the John Warfield Excellence in Teaching (2007).
Courses:
Peoples and Cultures of Africa
Gender course on Yoruba Women
African Film
Beginning Yoruba
11- Neville Hoad
Neville Hoad is associate professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota, 2007) and co-editor (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) of Sex & Politics in South Africa: Equality/ Gay & Lesbian Movement / the Anti-Apartheid Struggle (Double Storey, 2005). He is currently working on a book on the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Courses:
Introduction to South African Fiction in English
The Literature of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic in Africa
The Homoerotics of Empire
Neville Hoad has organized and co-coordinator of “World AIDS Day Conference” with James Wilson (History)
12-Jemima Pierre
Dr. Jemima Pierre is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching concentrations include: racial formation theory, critical theory of the African diaspora, race and knowledge production, and racialization processes in the African postcolony. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled, Race Across the Atlantic: Postcolonial Africa and the Predicaments of Racialization, which is an ethnographic study of the historical and contemporary race-craft in urban Ghana. Dr. Pierre’s latest publication is entitled, “I Like Your Color: Skin Bleaching and Geographies of Race in Urban Ghana,” and appears in Feminist Review (90). Other publications have appeared in, among others, Transforming Anthropology, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Wadabagei: A Journal of the Caribbean and Its Diaspora, and American Anthropologist.
13- Christopher Adejumo
Associate Professor Christopher Adejumo received his BA degree in Fine Arts (Graphic Design) in 1983 from the University of Benin, Nigeria. He earned an MFA in Visual Design (Printmaking) at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, 1993. Adejumo received his Ph.D. in Art Education from the Ohio State University in 1997.
Adejumo’s current research interests are in the areas of community-based art education, visual and material culture art education, studio art as visual research, and service-learning in art education. His recent publications include Migration and Slavery as Paradigms in the Aesthetic Transformation of Yoruba Art in the Americas. In Toyin Falola, Niyi Afolabi, Aderonke A. Adesanya (Eds.). Movements, Migrations and Creative Expressions in Africa and the African Diaspor. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press; Understanding Yoruba Art and Culture through Ethnography. In Toyin Falola and Ann Genova (Eds.). Yoruba Creativity: Fiction, Language, Life and Songs. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc.; and *Adejumo, C. O. (2004). Apprenticeship, Continuity and Patronage in Traditional Yoruba Art. TRIBAL Magazine, No. 34, pp. 86-94.
Adejumo’s relief prints, low-relief sculptures, and paintings have been shown in over thirty state, national, and international exhibitions, of which twelve were solo exhibitions. He has conducted over thirty visual art workshops at reputable venues, including the Dallas Museum of Art. In 2006, he collaborated with the Dallas Museum of Art in the production of a documentary on the Yoruba Ibeji or twin figures. Adejumo is the founder and Director of the Greater Tomorrow Youth Art Program in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2004, he received the Eugene Grigsby Jr. national award for “outstanding contributions to community-based art education,” given by the National Art Education Association.
14- Moyo Okediji
Moyo Okediji is an art historian, artist, and curator. He studied fine arts at the University of Ife, before proceeding to the University of Benin, where he did an MFA in African art criticism, poetry, and painting. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he received a Ph.D. in African arts and Diaspora visual cultures. He has apprenticed with several indigenous African artists working in both sacred and secular mediums including mat weaving, textile designs, terra cotta, shrine painting, and sculpture.
After teaching for several years in Nigeria, Okediji relocated to the United States in 1992. For ten years he was the curator of African and Oceanic arts at the Denver Art Museum. he has taught at various colleges in the United States, including Wellesley College, Gettysburg College, university of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Colorado at Denver. He has also exhibited at various places including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC,. the Corcoran Center, London, and the National Museum Gallery, Lagos Nigeria. he is the author of books and exhibition catalogues including African Renaissance, Old Forms, New Images in Nigerian Art; and The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth Century American Art.
Courses:
Museums and African Art: The Case of the Egungun Masquerade
Diaspora Visions
Africana Women's Art
Yoruba Art and Mythologies
