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Welcome to the Abstracts and Bios section!

Click on the letter range to the right to find the Abstract or Panelist you desire.

B. A. Raji He is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He is also a Lecturer II in the Department of Geography and Regional Planning, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria.

Dennis M. Rathnaw holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Music from the University of Texas at Austin. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at Texas, focusing on West and Central African popular music. His research includes the interaction between media and politics in the production of popular music, most notably bikutsi music in Cameroon. He is specifically interested in people’s creative use of, and response to, global media. Rathnaw has toured extensively with various African musical groups, and founded the Austin, Texas afropop bands Easy Motion Tourist and Orchestre Bend Skin.

Christiane Reichart-Burikukiye has received her M.A. in African History and Social Anthropology from the Humboldt-University in Berlin. She is a PhD Candidate at Justus-Liebig-University of Gießen/Germany. Her research and teaching focused on social and cultural history in East Africa, with special interest in youth, gender questions, religion, and memory cultures. Also she did research on the image of Africans in Germany and the image of Germans in Tanzania with special respect to the colonial past. She is writing her Ph.D. thesis on Youth in Colonial Kenya. She has published several book articles on memory cultures in East Africa and Germany. Her book on the history of railways in German East Africa has been published in 2005.

Jeremy Rich is an Associate Professor of History at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. His first book, A Workman is Worthy of His Meat: Food and Colonialism in the Gabon Estuary, was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. He has authored over 20 book chapters and articles on colonial Gabonese history. He is presently working on a monograph on the experiences of Appalachian biologist Richard Lynch Garner in Gabon between 1893 and 1918.

Marsha R. Robinson contributes to the African Renaissance by applying the history of gender, law, and economy in the Green Sahara Diaspora to twenty-first century policy issues. She teaches African, African Diaspora and African American history at Otterbein College where she is the interim director of Black Studies.  She is a graduate of the School of  Foreign Service, Georgetown University and earned her doctorate at the Ohio State University. She is co-author with Dr. Claire Robertson of "(Re)Modeling Slavery as if Women Matter/ed" in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph C. Miller , eds., Women and Slavery, Ohio University Press, 2008. Her chapter, “Gender Wars and Passionate Economic Crises – Remembering Africa’s Intercontinental Empires,” has been accepted in Toyin Falola and Raphael Njoku eds, War and Peace in Africa: History, Nationalism and the State, Routledge University Press, forthcoming. She is completing a manuscript entitled Matriarchy, Patriarchy and Imperialism in Africa.

Matthew Schnurr is an Assistant Professor in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2008. His doctoral research investigates attempts by settlers and scientists to impose cotton as a commodity crop in kwaZulu and Natal, South Africa. The first publication from this research will appear in the upcoming edition of the South African Historical Journal.

A. G. Shaibu: She has just completed a B.Sc.Hons. in Geography and Regional Planning, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria. She is currently on the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in one of the State in Nigeria.

Michael Sharp was educated at universities in Britain and the United States. His PhD is from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Sharp has taught in Scotland, Greece, Portugal, Nigeria, and at the universities of Binghamton, Harvard, and Wisconsin. He has been a Teaching Fellow in the International School of Theory in the Humanities at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Trained as a Romanticist and in the Literature and Ideas of the nineteenth century, Michael Sharp teaches in the University of Puerto Rico's Department of English where he is active in both the English M.A. and Caribbean PhD programs. His research focuses on the poetry of Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean diaspora. Michael Sharp's poetry has been published on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ogundiran Soumonni is a doctoral student in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia. His area of focus is Energy Policy with additional interests in comparative Science and Technology Policy more broadly. He has presented his previous work on biofuels development in Africa at the GLOBELICS (The Global Network for Economics of Learning, Innovation, and Competence Building Systems) conference in Mexico City in September 2008 and on “World Reactions to Biofuels Development” at the AAAS ( American Academy for the Advancement of Science) annual meeting in Chicago in February 2009. Prior to entering the PhD program, he worked as a materials engineer in the area of energy-efficient materials for advanced lighting technologies. He is a native of the Republic of Benin.

Elinami Veraeli Swai holds a doctorate degree in Adult Education and Women Studies from Pennsylvania State University, U.S.A. Her major research was on learning and the development of identity from a socio-cultural and semiotic approach. Currently, Elinami is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Toledo, with scholarly interests in women’s issues in the global economy. Elinami has made several presentations at national and international conferences and has written and contributed papers in journals such as Africa Today and the African Files at Issue Enzine. She has also contributed chapters in books such as Toyin Falola and Matthew Heaton, (Eds.), Endangered Bodies: Women, Children and Health in Africa (Africa World Press, 2006); Toyin Falola and Niyi Afolabi (Eds.), The Human Cost of African Migrations (2007) ; Moses Oketch and Maurice Amutabi (Eds.), The Distance Future: Perspectives on Lifelong Learning in Africa (Kluwer, Forthcoming); Chima J. Korieh and Philomena Okeke (Eds.), Gendering Transformations: Gender, Culture, Race, and Identity in a Global Context (Ihejirika , Forthcoming). Elinami is also a reviewer of the journal New Horizons in Adult Education & Human Resource Development. In addition to a Fulbright scholarship, Elinami has received grants and fellowships from the Margaret McNamara Foundation; Delta Kappa Gamma International; the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency; and the Alpha Kappa Chapter of Pi Lambda Theta Pennsylvania State University Association.

Olivier J. Tchouaffe is a visiting Assistant Professor at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX. He teaches classes on Communication and Film Studies. He currently working on a book on Cameroonian cinema and grassroots democratic activism in the country

Bridget Teboh is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth. She holds an M.A. and a PhD from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). She received a B.A. (Hons.) from the University of Cameroon, Yaounde, and a DUEF (Diplome d’Universite d’Etudes Francais) from Universite Jean-Moulin, Lyon III, France. She specializes in African History; African-American History; Women’s and Gender studies; oral history; and historical ethnography. Her current research interests are colonialism, post-coloniality, historical biography, and women’s and gender history. In 1996 and 1998, Dr. Teboh served as a Ford Foundation and ISOP (International Studies and Overseas Program) Scholar-in-Residence and Research Affiliate of the University of Cameroon, Yaounde. She has written on African history and culture, historical methods, African feminism, economic development and health, some as journal articles and book chapters, the latest titled, “Locating Women in Early 20 th Century Moghamo History,” in Emergent Themes and Methods in African Studies: Essays in Honor of Adiele E. Afigbo , eds. Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock (Africa World Press: Trenten, New Jersey, 2009). This enabled her to take up such diverse questions as the silencing of women under colonial rule and in the post colony of Cameroon; the uses of rituals and ritualized activities; women’s ikah [power] in Moghamoland; self-naming processes; and identity within Africa and the African Diaspora. Dr. Teboh presently is working on two book projects, “Unruly Mothers, Combative Wives:Rituals, Women and Change in the Cameroon Grassfields c. 1889-1960,” a study of British and German colonialism in West Cameroon during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and also Herstory: The Life and Times of “Madame Maternity,” a political figure and health worker.

Jason Theriot is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Houston. His current research deals with the history of the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico and the environmental impacts of oil field canals on coastal wetlands in Louisiana. His dissertation topic is “The Tennessee Gas Muskrat Line: Building America’s Energy Corridor through South Louisiana’s Wetlands.” He is also the co-author of an article, “Who Destroyed the Marsh?: Oil Field Canals, Coastal Ecology, and the Debate over Louisiana’s Shrinking Wetlands,” forthcoming in Economic History Yearbook (Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte), published by the University of Köln, Germany, Fall 2009.

Charles Ukeje is a Reader in International Relations, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and, until recently, held a Lectureship in African Politics and Development in the Department of International Development, Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, England. A past recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship, he was given the Mary Kingsley Zochonis Lecture Award of the Royal African Society, UK, in September 2004, and the Leventis Cooperation Visiting Research Scholarship at the Centre for African Studies, SOAS, London, the following year. He has published extensively in major peer-reviewed journals, including Issue- A Journal of Opinion; Africa Development; Politics, Culture and Society; Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence; Oxford Development Studies; Ethnic and Racial Studies; and Globalisations. He co-edited The Crisis of the State and Regionalism in West Africa: Identity, Citizenship and Conflict (2005); and contributed a chapter in Colette

Daiute et. al., Global Perspective on Youth Conflict and Resilience ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Aribidesi Usman , is associate professor of Anthropology and African & African American Studies at Arizona State University. His research and publications focus on African history and archaeology, especially in the precolonial and contact period, African urbanism, regional political and economic interaction, frontier dynamics, Africans and transatlantic contacts, indigenous technology, and cultural resource management. His publications include: “State-Periphery Relations and Sociopolitical Development in Igbominaland, Northcentral Yoruba, Nigeria,” a BAR monograph (Archeopress, London, 2001); “Movement, Borders, and Identities in Africa,” co-edited with Toyin Falola (in press, University of Rochester Press, 2009), and several articles in anthologies and journals. He is currently working on a book – “The Yoruba Frontier: A Regional History of Community Formation, Experience, and Changes in West Africa (ca. 1200-1900 AD).”

Uyilawa Usuanlele was educated in Nigeria, Sweden, and Canada and majored in African history. He worked as an administrator and researcher with the National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC), Lagos and Benin City, Nigeria and was a founding member/ coordinator of the Institute for Benin Studies, Benin City, Nigeria. He has contributed articles and chapters to journals and books and presently teaches African history at the State University of New York (SUNY), Oswego, New York state.

Ojakorotu Victor obtained his doctorate from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a Lecturer at the Department of International Studies, Monash University, Johannesburg. Dr Ojakorotu Victor’s primary research interest is in the field of natural resources and conflict in Africa with special focus on the Niger Delta of Nigeria. He has published extensively on the Niger Delta crisis of Nigeria.

Pamela Wadende is a doctoral student in the Education and Psychological Services Department of Texas State University-San Marcos. Her major is Adult, Professional, and Community Education. Her research interests include Kenyan women's social history, women's social action, and the enhancement of Adult Education services to Kenyans as a basis for community development and the creation of peace.

Eric Wayne Wheeler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Africa Conference 2009: Science, Technology and Environment

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