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The Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) has a core faculty made up of professors and lecturers who hold appointments in CAAS or have a formal association within the Center.

Core Faculty

PAUL ANDERSON (paanders@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture

Research and teaching interests: African American and U.S. intellectual and cultural history, the Harlem Renaissance, history and representation of jazz and African American music, critical theory and Black modernism
Selected publications: Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke University Press, 2001)

ADAM ASHFORTH (Ashforth@umich.edu)
Visiting Professor, Afroamerican and African Studies

Research and teaching interests: HIV/AIDS in rural Malawi, ethnic conflict in Kenya's rift valley history and representation of jazz and African American music, critical theory and Black modernism
Selected publications: Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Madumo, A Man Bewitched (University of Chicago Press, 2000), The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth Century South Africa (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1990)

KELLY ASKEW (kaskew@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology

Research and teaching interests: sociocultural anthropology, cultural politics, ethnomusicology, nationalism, media, performance, Swahili studies, East Africa
Selected publications: The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, co-editor (Blackwell, 2002), Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 2002)

MICHAEL AWKWARD (michawk@umich.edu)
Gayl A. Jones Collegiate Professor of Afro-American Literature and Culture, Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English Language

Research and teaching interests: representations of gender in African American expressive culture
Selected publications: Philadelphia Freedoms, an interdisciplinary examination of sites of contestations over the meanings of black identity in the decades following Martin Luther King's assassination (in progress); Soul Covers: Rhythm and Blues Music and the Struggle for Artistic Identity: Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Phoebe Snow (Duke University Press, 2007), Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir (Duke University Press, 2000)

MARLYSE BAPTISTA (baptistm@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Linguistics

Research and teaching interests: morpho-syntax interface in pidgin and Creole languages, combining corpus data with the use of theoretical, descriptive and technological tools; how Creole languages inform linguistic theory and to what extent linguistic theory, in turn, informs Creole grammatical systems
Selected publications: Noun Phrases in Creole Languages: A Multi-faceted Approach, co-editor (John Benjamins, 2007), The Syntax of Cape Verdean Creole: The Sotavento Varieties (John Benjamins, 2003)

LORI BROOKS (llbrooks@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture

Research and teaching interests: race and cultural studies, urban culture, black intellectual culture, popular culture with a special interest in music, humor and performance
Selected publications: Syncopated Cosmopolitanism: African American Performing Artists in the Age of Plessy, focuses on a pioneering group of African American male performing artists and their construction of urban, cosmopolitan identities that responded to the challenges facing African Americans in the twentieth century: urbanization, racial segregation, the racial politics of U.S. imperialism, and strategies of representation and professionalization in American popular culture (in progress).

JAMES CHAFFERS (chaffers@umich.edu)
Professor of Architecture

Research and teaching interests: design links between spatial equality and human spirituality

ANGELA D. DILLARD (adillard@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Associate Professor in the Residential College, LSA

Research and teaching interests: American and African American intellectual history and political thought, religious studies, critical race theory, conservatism
Selected publications: Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (University of Michigan Press, 2007), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?: Multicultural Conservatism in America (New York University Press, 2001)

DAVID T. DORIS (dtdoris@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History of Art

Research and teaching interests: history of African arts and visual cultures, art and culture of the Yoruba people, both in southwestern Nigeria and in the Diaspora; theories of cross-cultural interpretation, conceptions of an "anti-aesthetic" in African contexts, the representation of Africa and its peoples in world's fairs, theme parks, and other commodity spectacles
Selected publications: Vigilant Things: the Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Southwestern Nigeria (in progress)

SCOTT ELLSWORTH (scottell@umich.edu)
Visiting Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies

Research and teaching interests: history and literature of the American South, slavery, the Civil Rights movement, criminal justice in America
Selected publications: Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), The Secret Game (in progress)

AMAL HASSAN FADLALLA (afadlall@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Women's Studies

Research and teaching interests: reproduction, sexuality, health identity, poverty, population and development, transnational feminism Diaspora studies, gender dynamics, social inequities, cultural world views, local and global political economies (Africa, the Middle East and the Diaspora)
Selected publications: Embodying Honor: Fertility, Foreignness, and Regeneration in Eastern Sudan (in progress)

YASUMASA FUJINAGA (chicago@mjb.nifty.com)
Visiting Fulbright Scholar

Yasumasa Fuijinaga is an Associate Professor of American History at Yamaguchi University in Japan. His research project, “The Problem of Post-Civil Rights America: the Black Power Movement and Its Impact on Sociopolitical Transformation of America,” will reconsider the historical legacies, both negative and positive, of the African American political and social movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

KEVIN GAINES (gaineskk@umich.edu)
Director, Center for Afroamerican and African Studies; Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History

Research and teaching interests: U.S. and African American intellectual and cultural history, race and gender politics in post-World War II America, African American cultural production, global dimensions of U.S. struggles over the meaning of citizenship
Selected publications: American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2006), Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (North Carolina Press, 1996)

LORNA GOODISON (goodison@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English

Research and teaching interests: creative writing (poetry)
Selected publications: Travelling Mercies (McClelland and Stewart, 2001), Guinea Woman: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2000), Turn Thanks (University of Illinois Press, 1999)

SANDRA GUNNING (sgunning@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture

Research and teaching interests: African American literature particularly autobiography, travel writing, and the early African Diaspora; 19th/20th century American literature
Selected publications: Subject to Location: Gender, Place, and Writing in the Early Anglophone African Diaspora (in progress), Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas, co-editor (Blackwell, 2004), The Marrow of Tradition, co-editor (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2002)

NESHA HANIFF (nzh@umich.edu)
Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies and Women's Studies

Research and teaching interests: empowerment pedagogies and marginalized populations, HIV/AIDS, violence, women's reproductive health
Current projects: Director, Community Education Project on Violence at the Jamaica Planned Association, St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica; Director, Pedagogy of Action HIV/AIDS Education Program and study abroad to South Africa

JANA HECZKOVÁ (jana.heczkova@gmail.com)
Visiting Fulbright Scholar

Jana Heczková received her M.A. in English and History from Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, in 2005. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on the topic of memory in texts by contemporary African American and Native American writers. Her research interests include the historical experience of minorities and colonized peoples in the Anglophone world. She focuses on how any ensuing cultural confrontations between minority and majority cultures affect literary texts in terms of their ability to present the past. Her research interest also extends to issues of cultural memory and historical trauma in general.

LORI HILL (lohill@mich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Education

Research and teaching interests: education inequality and stratification, urban education, South African education and social policy

MPHAPHO “RA” HLASANE (rhalasane@umich.edu)
SAIO Moody Exchange Scholar

Mphapho “Ra” Hlasane is completing a MFA at the University of Johannesburg. His research project, “Photovoice, Mapping and Mural Making as Mobilizing Tools for Social Change”, exploring the use of visual strategies to extend marketing and health services to the Kutloano Papermaking group (a project of Phumani paper). He directs a community space, Keleketla!Library dedicated to promoting literature and cultural literacy. He is also a facilitator for the Ford Foundation’s New Partners/New Knowledge, an art and social change research project.

AUGUSTIN HOLL (holla@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology, Curator of African Archaeology at the Museum of Anthropology

Research and teaching interests: issues of social evolution, the advent of food-producing economies, the emergence and growth of complex social systems in West Africa and the Levant
Selected publications: Ethnoarchaeology of Shuwa-Arab Settlements (Lexington Books, 2003), The Land of Houlouf: Genesis of a Chadic Polity: 1900BC-AD1800, Memoirs of the Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan (Museum of Anthropology Publications, 2002)

SEAN JACOBS (shjacobs@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Communication Studies

Research and teaching interests: relation between media, democracy and political power; the social power of media, Southern African politics, democratic transitions, race and identity
Selected publications: Thabo Mbeki's World: The Ideology and Politics of the South African President, co-editor (University of Natal Press, 2002)

PAUL CHRISTOPHER JOHNSON (paulcjoh@umich.edu)
Director, Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History; Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History

Research and teaching interests: history and ethnography of the religions of the African Diaspora in Brazil and the Caribbean, religion and race, religion and migration, ritual studies, methodological and theoretical perspectives on the comparative study of religion
Selected publications: To Be Possessed: “Religion” and the Purification of Spirits (in progress), Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery in Africa (University of California Press, 2007), Secrets, Gossip and Gods: The Transformation of Brazilian Candomblé (Oxford University Press, 2002)

MARTHA S. JONES (msjonz@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History, visiting Assistant professor of Law

Research and teaching interests: intellectual and cultural history of black women's public lives in nineteenth-century America
Selected publications: All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African-American Public Culture, 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007)

COLEMAN A. JORDAN (caje@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Architecture

Research and teaching interests: ways in which architectural spaces, detail, and forms can represent and construct diverse cultural identities, African American identity in domestic and international contexts, narrative and autobiographical approaches to American identity as inscribed in the structures of the past and present, slave holding castles in Ghana, western discourses of space and identity in Europe and the United States
Selected publications: Building Black Bondage (in progress)

KARYN LACY (krlacy@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Sociology

Selected publications: Blue-Chip Black: Race, Class, and Status in the New Black Middle Class (University of California Press, 2007)

ROBIN R. MEANS-COLEMAN (rrmc@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Communication Studies

Research and teaching interests: African Americans and the media: texts, contexts, industry, and audiences; Black popular culture, African American identity formation/performance
Selected publications: Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity, editor (Routledge, 2002), African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (Routledge, 2000)

TIYA MILES (tiya@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture

Research and teaching interests: interrelated and comparative histories of African Americans and Native Americans, history of African American women, history, literature and feminist thought, activism of women of color
Selected publications: Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, co-editor (Duke University Press, 2006), Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 2005)

DAMANI PARTRIDGE (djpartri@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology

Research and teaching interests: cultural anthropology, race and displacement, citizenship and non-citizens, technologies of exclusion, gender and sexuality, critical visual anthropology, German studies, European studies, anthropology of the state, post-socialism

SESHINI PILLAY (seshini@umich.edu)
SAIO Moody Exchange Scholar

Seshini Pillay is a PhD student from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She is currently writing her doctoral thesis on “The role of computational simulation in building appropriate mental models in physics teaching and learning”. Her research project explores the effectiveness of student-generated simulations in the teaching and learning of physics. The goal of the project is to generate comprehensive, widely accessible worksheet-based activities which highlight computational modeling, visualization and multi-representational problem-solving.

ELISHA P. RENNE (erenne@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Anthropology

Research and teaching interests: maternal and child health in Africa, African art and aesthetics, ethnographic research methods
Selected publications: Population and Progress in a Yoruba Town (University of Michigan Press, 2003), Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations, co-editor (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Population and Development Issues, co-editor (African BookBuilders Ltd. 2000)

SHERIE RANDOLPH (smrand@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History

Research and teaching interests: creation of a feminist pedagogy for political and social change, African Americans, the African Diaspora, women and gender
Selected publications: Florynce "Flo" Kennedy and Black Feminist Politics in Postwar America (in progress)

LARRY ROWLEY (llrowley@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Higher Education

Research and teaching interests: social theoretical frameworks, empirical analyses of higher education issues, developments and institutions

DAKYES USMAN SAMAILA (dakyess@umich.edu)
Visiting Scholar and McArthur Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dakyes Usman Samaila received his PhD in industrial design from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria, in 2006. He is a specialist in graphic design and printing, focusing on security printing materials and techniques used in currency production. His current research project focuses on the use of local materials in the production of securing resins and inks in order to reduce document forgery in Nigeria

XIOMARA A. SANTAMARINA (xiomara@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English

Research and teaching interests: 19th Century African American literatures with a primary focus on autobiography and slave narratives, antebellum fiction and prose, economic criticism, theories of value, race and labor; U.S. Literature, feminist theory
Selected publications: Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

JULIUS S. SCOTT (jsscott@umich.edu)
Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies and History

Research and teaching interests: networks linking slave societies and the roles that enslaved black workers played in forging and elaborating those connections
Selected publications: The Common Wind, a close study of the ways in which the Haitian Revolution influenced black residents of territories in North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America (in progress)

RAYMOND SILVERMAN (silveray@umich.edu)
Director, Museum Studies Program; Professor of History of Art

Research and teaching interests: the interaction between West Africa and the cultures of the Middle East and the West, history of metalworking in West Africa and Ethiopia, visual culture of religion in 20th-century Ethiopia
Selected publications: Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity, editor (University of Washington Press, 1999)

HOWARD STEIN (howstein@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology

Research and teaching interests: African development, including foreign aid, finance, institutional transformation, industrial and trade policy, health and poverty and structural adjustment
Selected publications: Beyond the World Bank Agenda: an Institutional Approach to Development (in progress), Deregulation and the Banking Crisis in Nigeria: A Comparative Study, co-editor (Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), Asian Industrialization and Africa: Studies in Policy Alternatives to Structural Adjustment (Palgrave MacMillan, 1995)

MEGAN SWEENEY (meganls@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and English

Research and teaching interests: 20th/21st century African American literature and culture, inter-American literatures, critical race studies, transnational feminist and gender studies, critical prison studies, cultural studies, ethnography
Selected publications: ‘The Underground Book Railroad’: Cultures of Reading in Women’s Prisons weaves together ethnography, historical research and literary analysis in exploring the roles that reading has played in incarcerated women's lives (under review).

RUTI TALMOR (rtalmor@umich.edu)
DuBois-Mandela-Rodney Postdoctoral Fellow

Ruti Talmor has a background in art and ethnographic film and completed her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology in 2008 at New York University. Her works on art, media, and other forms of cultural production in Ghana, investigating art worlds as intercultural zones where globally circulating African-American and Caribbean cultural and discursive models of Africa provide a shared language for Ghanaians and foreigners. Her dissertation, "Crafting Intercultural Desire: Transforming Nation, Art, and Personhood in Ghana," explores how participation in art worlds past and present transforms notions of masculinity, knowledge, and power, and serves as a conduit for cosmopolitan ambitions, transnational desires, and political struggles over the meanings of being Ghanaian. She will transform her dissertation into a book manuscript.

DORCETA TAYLOR (dorceta@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Environmental Sociology

Research and teaching interests: the study social movements, environmental justice, environmental history, leisure and natural resource use, poverty and urban issues, race, gender and ethnic relations; the dynamics of the mainstream, environmental justice movements

RICHARD TURITS (rturits@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and History

Research and teaching interests: race and slavery, violence and authoritarianism, U.S. overseas interventions
Selected publications: Race, Slavery, and Freedom Beyond the Plantation: The Greater Spanish Caribbean in Comparative Perspective (in progress), Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History (Stanford University Press, 2003)

ADA VERLOREN (Verloren@umich.edu)
Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies and Senior Research Associate, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations

Research and teaching interests: international justice, truth and reconciliation in South Africa
Selected publications: Discovery at the NLRB—Why Not?, co-author (Wayne State University Law Review, 2005), The First Quarter Century of the Center for Civil and Human Rights (Notre Dame Human Rights Advocate, 2000)

HANES WALTON (hantonjr@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Political Science

Research and teaching interests: American politics, race and politics, political parties, presidential elections, voting behavior, African politics, public opinion and the Confederate flag
Selected publications: American Politics and the African American Quest for Universal Freedom, 3rd Edition, co-author (Longman Classics, 2005), Reelection: Liberian Politics: The Portrait by African American Diplomat J. Milton Turner, co-editor (Lexington Books, 2002), William J. Clinton as A Native Son Presidential Candidate (Columbia University Press, 2000)

STEPHEN WARD (smward@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Associate Professor in the Residential College

Research and teaching interests: history of black radical thought, the relationship between intellectual production and social change, ideological origins and historical development of the Black Power movement, the development of the Black Power movement in Detroit, intellectual work and political activism of James and Grace Lee Boggs

WARREN WHATLEY (wwhatley@umich.edu)
Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Economics

Research and teaching interests: economic history of African Americans in the twentieth century, cotton mechanization and the black migration, African American industrial workers in the twentieth century north, roots of urban poverty, small business development in the inner-city, the digital divide, supply conditions of the trans-Atlantic slave trade from 1440-1800

ALFORD YOUNG, JR. (ayoun@umich.edu)
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and Sociology

Research and teaching interests: race and urban poverty, low income African American men in urban communities, African American social thought, African American intellectuals
Selected publications: The Souls of W. E. B. DuBois co-author (Paradigm Publishers, 2006), The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton University Press, 2004)

MAGDALENA J. ZABOROWSKA (mzaborow@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and American Culture

Research and teaching interests: immigration and ethnicity, the ways in which race, sexuality and architecture intersect in the narratives of national identity across the Atlantic
Selected publications: Erotics of Space: James Baldwin, Race, and the Transatlantic Architextures of American Identity (in progress), Over the Wall/After the Fall: Postcommunist Cultures in the East-West Gaze, co-editor (Indiana University Press, 2004)


Adjunct & Associate Faculty

MELBA JOYCE BOYD (boydmj@umich.edu)
Visiting Professor of African American and African Studies

Selected publications: Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (Columbia University Press, 2003), The Province of Literary Cats (Past Tents Press, 2002), Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press, 2001)

BUNYAN BRYANT, JR. (bbryant@umich.edu)
Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Professor of Natural Resources and Urban Planning

Research and teaching interests: developing case studies on corporate, agency, and community responses to hazardous waste sites
Selected publications: Environmental Justice: Issues, Policies, and Solutions, co-editor (Island Press, 1995), Environmental Advocacy: Concepts, Issues and Dilemmas (Caddo Gap Press, 1990)

MARK CLAGUE (claguem@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Musicology, School of Music; Associate Director, American Music Institute and Faculty Associate, American Culture Program

Research and teaching interests: the relationship of black music to social and aesthetic politics, music and race,the music of Alton Adams, Bennie Benjamin, Ornette Coleman, Wynton Marsalis, Herbert Mells and George Walker
Selected publications: Memoirs of Alton Augustus Adams, Sr: First Black Bandmaster of the United States Navy, editor (University of California Press, 2008)

DAVID WILLIAM COHEN (dwcohen@umich.edu)
Lemuel A. Johnson Collegiate Professor of African Anthropology and History

Research and teaching interests: authoritative grounds and fates of different forms of expertise: scholarly, public, private, and official; pre-Colonial Uganda
Selected publications: African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, co-editor (Indiana University Press, 2001), Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics, co-author (Scholarly Publishing Office, 2005)

ELIZABETH COLE (ecole@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Psychology

Research and teaching interests: the individual sense of self as connected to social groups and how that relates to their attitudes toward public policy, the roles individuals choose to play in the political sphere, how individuals experience their social environments

PATRICIA COLEMAN-BURNS (pcb@umich.edu)
Assistant Professor of Nursing, Division of Acute, Critical and Long Care Term Programs

FRIEDA EKOTTO (ekotto@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature

Research and teaching interests: twentieth-century narratives and theater, European intellectual history and philosophy, postcolonialism, film, writing and violence, legal discourse and literature, psychoanalysis and sociological approaches, critical discourse and cultural studies, French and Francophone literatures, feminist discourses and narratives of Francophone women writers, West African and Francophone theater, North African women writers and questions of silence and madness
Selected publications: Ne chuchote pas trop (L'Harmattan, 2005), Encyclopedia of African Literature, co-author (Routledge, 2004), Back from Babylon: Repetition and Difference in Post/Modernist African Cultural Production (University of New York Press, 2003)

REYNOLDS FARLEY (renf@umich.edu)
Professor of Sociology

Research and teaching interests: human ecology, city growth and structure, urbanization, residential segregation, contemporary urban inequalities

JON ONYE LOCKARD (jmlockaz@umich.edu)
Adjunct Lecturer

Research and teaching interests: African, Afro-Brazilian and traditional art of the Americas; contemporary African American art, comparative Black art

LESTER MONTS (lmonts@umich.edu)
Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Senior Counselor to the President for the Arts, Diversity, and Undergraduate Affairs; Professor of Ethnomusicology

Research and teaching interests: African and African American music, music of the Vai people of Liberia and Sierra Leone, music historiography, music and Islam in Africa, multimedia technology and its application to music research and teaching

JEROME O. NRIAGU (jnriagu@umich.edu)
Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, Research Scientist at the Center for Human Growth & Development

Research and teaching interests:sources, behavior, fate and effects of metals in the natural and contaminated environments; environmental justice and disproportionate exposure of communities to environmental pollutants, environmental health problems in the developing countries

MAXWELL OWUSU (omk@umich.edu)
Professor of Anthropology

Research and teaching interests: aspects of democracy and democratization at the local level in Africa

REBECCA SCOTT (rjscott@umich.edu)
Charles Gibson Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of Law

Research and teaching interests: slavery, emancipation, post-emancipation societies in Cuba and Brazil
Selected publications: Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), Beyond Slavery: Explorations on Race, Labor, and Citizenship, co-author (University of North Carolina Press, 2000)

EDWARD WEST (ewest@umich.edu)
Professor of Art

Research and teaching interests: photography, photographic investigations of the socialist worker's life in China, daily life in Black South Africa, light and shadow in the Italian landscape

MELVIN D. WILLIAMS (mddoublu@umich.edu)
Professor of Anthropology

Research and teaching interests: studies of contemporary American society, African American life, globalism
Selected publications: Race for Theory (self-published, Ann Arbor MI, 1996), The Human Dilemma: A Decade Later in Belmar: A Revision of on the Street Where I Lived (Harcourt, 1991)

ROBIN WILSON (robinwil@umich.edu)
Associate Professor of Dance

Research and teaching interests: choreography and movement, African Diasporic dance forms in the Americas, Afro-Cuban dance, the intersection of African dance with western movement forms

RONALD WOODS (rcwoods@umich.edu)
Lecturer in Afroamerican and African Studies

Kevin Gaines, Director
University of Michigan Center for Afroamerican and African Studies
505 S. State St.| 4700 Haven | Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045 | (734) 764-5513
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