Faculty
Liz MacGonagle is an African historian in the Departments of History and African & African-American Studies. In her research, she crosses historical, geographical, and theoretical boundaries to link nation, culture, and ethnicity to processes of identity formation in African and Diasporan settings. She has served as the Director of KASC since August 2013.
Peter Ojiambo is the Faculty Associate Director of the Kansas African Studies Center and an Associate Professor in the Department of African & African-American Studies. His scholarship focuses on African education, African educational biographies, non-Western educational thought, and educational leadership studies. His deep research experience in East Africa has led to publications about the Starehe Boys Center and School of Kenya. Dr. Ojiambo teaches Kiswahili and has developed a Kiswahili teaching website. He is a Co-Director of the first-ever Humanities Lab at KU, known as colLAB.
Cécile Accilien is Interim Chair and Associate Professor of Haitian Studies and Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies in the Department of African and African-American Studies. Her primary areas of interest include Haitian Studies, Gender Studies and Film Studies.
Glenn Adams conducts research in African and other settings outside the Euro American mainstream of psychological science.
Shawn Leigh Alexander's area of research concentration is African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Professor Asiedu’s research focuses on Foreign Direct Investment, Foreign Aid and HIV/AIDS. She teaches graduate and undergraduate classes in Development and International Economics. She has received several teaching/mentoring awards at the University of Kansas, including The Outstanding Woman Educator Award, Kemper Teaching Award, Byron Shutz Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Woman of Distinction Award.
Raj Bhala's research and teaching focus on international trade law, and Islamic Law.
Islamic Studies; the role of the ‘ulamā’ in contemporary Islam; popular religion; media and religion
Dr. Britton's major research interest is in gender and politics in Africa. Her research and writing examine how gender is utilized as a site of mobilization for women's social and political advancement, particularly in democratizing contexts.
Marie Grace Brown researches and teaches the modern Middle East with a special interest in women’s activism and national movements. Her current book project examines northern Sudanese women’s use of traditional dress to craft their gendered and national identities during Sudan’s independence movement of the 1950s.
Abel Chikanda (Ph.D., University of Western Ontario) is an Assistant Professor of African & African-American Studies and Geography. His main research and teaching interests include migration and development, refugee movement, food security, and the informal sector in Africa. He has held teaching positions at several universities in Canada including Western University, Queen’s University and the University of Waterloo.
Andy Denning's current research "Civilization through Motorization: Vehicles and Roads in Europe's African Empire" examines how vehicles and road projects became a lens through which Europeans viewed and experienced Africa.
Mohamed El-Hodiri (PhD in Economics and Mathematical Statistics, University of Minnesota), speaks Arabic, English, and Russian and is moderately proficient in French and Biblical Hebrew. He is very well informed on Arab History, Islam, and Middle Eastern religious history, especially pertaining to Egypt.
Professor Gerschultz’s research and teaching interests span modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Middle East, the linkages between textiles, gender, and materiality, and the sociopolitical dynamics of artists’ networks.
John Gluckman, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, more recently was an Instructor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from UCLA. His central research interests are on African languages, particularly in East Africa.
Research Areas: Biological anthropology, human population biology, human growth and development, maternal and child health and nutrition, metabolic adaptation, pastoralists; East Africa
Dr. Majid Hannoum lectures on North African and Arab societies, especially in the areas of Islamic social and political movements; Islam, colonialism, and nationalism in North Africa; and religion, power, and sexuality in Arab societies.
Randal Jelks' research and writing interests are in the areas of African American religious history, the African Diaspora, urban, and civil Rights History.
Prof Kelly specializes in contemporary French literature, the interrelationship of the arts, and French cinema. He regularly teaches courses in those fields. In poetry, novel, autofiction, and film, he is particularly interested in the conjuncture of tactile expression and sequencing (gesture, rhythm, paronomasia, image, sound and/or silence, pov, montage, collage, strophes or experiments in visual and writerly grouping of verse, plot events, images, maxims) with broader questions of self-crafting and ideology (liberations, resistances, human rights, social palimpsests and registers, national and transnational political thought, utopias and dystopias).
Christopher Kirchgasler (Ph.D, University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the historical, ethnographic and comparative qualities of schooling in East Africa, particularly as they relate to notions of inclusion, equity, and justice. His research directs attention to how contemporary transnational school reforms are "haunted" by colonial residues that define who and what are seen and acted on as the "problems" of individual and social development.
Professor Lang’s main research and teaching areas are African American working-class and labor history, the Black Freedom Movement, and black urban communities in the twentieth-century Midwest.
Professor Obadare's reasearch focuses on: Transnational Migration, Comparative Societies, Civil Society, Social Change, and Development in Africa.
In his research and teaching, Byron Caminero-Santangelo focuses on the relationships among language, literature, and pressing issues of justice, freedom, and sustainability in Africa.
Dr. Rhine's research focuses on the transnational flows of policies, professionals, technologies and resources devoted to intervening in global health problems in West Africa. She is particularly interested in understanding how medical technologies transform the ways individuals think about themselves and experience their bodies, as well as the ways they reconfigure families and social relationships.
Dr. Peter Ukpokodu lectures on African and African-American Theatre, African film, and African culture (especially traditional religion and thought), among others.
Stacey Vanderhurst is a cultural anthropologist specializing in gender, migration, and governance. She earned a PhD from Brown University and then served as the Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellow with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society at Indiana University’s Michael Maurer School of Law. She joined the WGSS faculty in Fall 2015.
Antje Ziethen is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Kansas. She specializes in global literature in French, with a particular focus on (urban) space, migration, transnationalism, gender, and modernity. Her research deals with different geographical areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, Québec, and Acadia.
Dr Anatol's research focuses on Caribbean and Caribbean Diaspora Literature, especially 20th- and 21st-century women’s writing, African American Literature, and Children’s and Young Adult Literature, particularly representations of race and gender in narratives for young people.
Subini Ancy Annamma, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Kansas. Her research and pedagogy focus on increasing access to equitable education for historically marginalized students and communities, particularly students of color with disabilities. Specifically, she critically examines the social construction of race and ability; how the two are interdependent, how they intersect with other identity markers, and how their mutually constitutive nature impacts education experiences. She centers this research in urban education and juvenile incarceration settings and focuses on how student voice can contribute to dismantling systemic inequities and identifying exemplary educational practices.
Barbara Barnett is a professor in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. She previously worked as a print journalist, covering health, politics and higher education. She also worked as a public relations professional in health communications and has organized communication projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. At KU, she teaches courses in reporting, research methods, media and diversity, media and popular culture and media and the military. She helps coordinate KU’s Media and the Military Project, funded by the McCormick Foundation. Her research focuses on media coverage of women who are victims and perpetrators of violence. She also has conducted research on women’s health and on gender and sports.
Dr. Beard's research focuses on reconstructing the origin and early evolution of the order Primates and its major clades. He is especially interested in documenting how changes in the Earth's physical environment have impacted the evolution of early primates and other mammals.
Dr. Birch's research interests include Strategic Management, International Business, International Trade and Investment, and Business in Latin America.
Anthony Bolden's teaching and research interests include African-American music, African-American cultural studies, popular culture, African literature, and ethnic-American literature. He has published extensively on Funk and Blues.
His interests include Social relations in Amazonian rural development, Expansion of soybean production in Amazonia, and Development and the Politics of Scale.
Patrizio Ceccagnoli is currently an Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Kansas, where he has taught since 2014. Previously, he taught Italian at University of Massachusetts Amherst, Fordham University, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2011.
Jacob M. Dakon, violinist, is an Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Kansas and a Research Fellow with the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
Brian Daldorph teaches creative writing, literature, and writing classes in the English department. He has also taught in Japan, Senegal, and England. His two books of poems, The Holocaust and Hiroshima: Poems, and Outcasts, were both published by Mid-America Press. He edits Coal City Review. His poems, stories, articles, and reviews have been widely published.
Dr Egbert's interests include: Use of time-series satellite imagery to characterize and monitor land use and land cover, Evaluation of geospatial technologies for mapping and maintaining minefield databases, and Geographic aspects of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and related crimes against humanity.
Research interests: US empire, Working class studies, Race and racism, Transnational studies
Dr Fawcett's mission is to understand and improve how people work together to create conditions for community health and development through collaborative research, teaching, and public service.
Mary Fry oversees the graduate program in sport and exercise psychology. Her research focuses on creating a caring and task-involving climate for youngsters in physical activity settings.
Dr Graham focuses on Genre Studies, including fiction and autobiography; African American literature;Archival Studies; Diaspora and Transnational Criticism and theories; and Digital humanities.
Sarah exhibits her work nationally and internationally and has had residencies at Greenwich House Pottery, Grand Valley State University, and the Lawrence Arts Center. Sarah was named a 2010 Emerging Artist by Ceramics Monthly, and she has work included in numerous collections including the U.S. Department of State, The University of Costa Rica, and the Shiwan Ceramics Museum in Foshan, China.
http://www.sarahgrossceramics.com
Dr. Hamer's general area of study is the sociological and qualitative study of families, especially those within the United States. Within this broad field, her primary research interests are African American fathers, mothers, and families, especially those that are urban, low-income and working class.
Ayesha Hardison area of research is Twentieth-century and twenty-first-century African American literature, Gender and sexuality studies, Cultural history and theory, and Twentieth-century and contemporary visual media.
Tanya Hartman has shown her work in a variety of venues and exhibitions all over the country, including the Banana Factory in Bethlehem, Pa.; the Chico Art Center in Chico, Calif.; and the Cinque Gallery and the A.I.R. Gallery in New York.
Dr. Dorothy E. Hines holds a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education. She received a Ph.D. in Education Policy from Michigan State University. Dr. Hines holds a Master's Degree in Public Administration from North Carolina Central University graduating Magna Cum Laude. Dr. Hines is a former high school U.S. History teacher, and she received a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from North Carolina State University. Previously Dr. Hines served as a Teaching Fellow with the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Nicole Hodges teaches courses on hip-hop, acting, African American theater, race and performance and improvisation theory. Her research interests include African-America drama, performance, and culture, hip-hop, women's and gender studies, solo performance and transnationalism.
Robert Hurst teaches film and video production and studies courses with an emphasis in sound and post-production. He joined the University of Kansas faculty in 2006. Robert has been making fiction, documentary and experimental films for more than twenty years.
Dr. Imber specializes in Educational Law, Policy, Reform, and Administration.
Dr. Jahanbani is an historian of American foreign relations specializing in the post-1945 period. She is especially interested in the legacy of the liberal internationalist tradition in American foreign policy. This includes the history of U.S. relations with the "Third World," the history of the social sciences, (particularly the history of modernization and development), and the emergence of distinctly "global" problems in the post-World War II period.
Meg Jamieson has been a filmmaker, writer and professor for a decade. Her personal films, a poetic blend of document and experiment, have played at museums and festivals around the world, and her film work with community groups as disparate as the Ada tribe in Ghana to the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast United States, have been used to give voice to histories which run parallel to the dominate narrative. She is interested in the intersection of experience and memory, and finds the film medium perfect for this exploration.
At present she is working on a feature length documentary about American combat veterans from Vietnam to Afghanistan.
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin
M.A., Comparative Literature, The University of Texas at Austin
B.A., Bethel College
Dr. Ngondi Kamatuka is the new director of the Center for Educational Opportunity Programs in the Achievement and Assessment Institute. He has been with the University of Kansas since 1987 and has served as academic services coordinator for the Upward Bound program and interim director for the Institute for Educational Research and Public Service.
Accounting and Information Systems
Dr Kennedy teaches undergraduate classes on China’s social and political development, politics of developing countries, and research methods, as well as graduate courses on comparative institutions and conducting fieldwork in developing countries. Dr. Kennedy is currently the Director of the Center for East Asian Studies.
Susan King teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in curriculum design, instructional methods, dance, and technology. Her research interests include the recruitment and retention of ethnic minorities, teacher reflection, professionalism, and the connection between physical activity and academic achievement.
Dr. Krishtalka’s research encompassed the evolution of mammals, with paleontological field expeditions throughout western Canada and the U. S., Europe, north and east Africa, China and Patagonia.
Marie-Alice L’Heureux teaches architectural design and a variety of seminars on the city and sustainability. She does research, writing, and teaching on the social and cultural issues that surround the successful implementation of principles of sustainability. She is especially interested in the legacy of infrastructural investment and the impact of unequal development over time. Geographically her work has focused on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as in the major cities of the United States and Canada.
Professor Adrian R. Lewis earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1995. His dissertation became his first book, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory, published in 2001 by UNC Press.. Research: 20th century warfare; World War II; the Cold War; the Korean War; the Vietnam War; operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Judith's large figurative oil paintings are distillations of both personal narrative themes and the influences from extensive travel to Mexico and South America. A continuing series of large figurative oils depicts phosphorescent female nudes in prone positions suggesting both sex and death. In these neo-romantic works, Judith takes a traditional subject and re-issues woman as a self-contained entity. Exuding a strong animalistic presence, these women defy appropriation as if frozen in anthropological time.
Specialization: Ancient Mediterranean cultures, languages & religions; ancient Greek & Coptic manuscripts.
Professor Mirecki is an active member of several international scholarly societies, has convened several international academic conferences, and regularly searches European and American museum collections for unstudied ancient manuscripts which he prepares for publication.
Dr Mark Mort studies the evolutionary relationships of the angiosperm family Crassulaceae using DNA sequences from chloroplast and nuclear gene regions
Joane Nagel is a political and cultural sociologist; her work focuses on ethnicities, genders, and sexualities in the US and in the global system, cultural production and construction, social and nationalist movements, American Indian activism, and global climate change. Her current research examines the sociological dimensions of global environmental change, specifically the race, class, gender, and sexual dimensions of climate change.
Professor Olsen is an Old World Prehistorian, specializing in zooarchaeology, the study of animal remains from ancient sites, and Arabian rock art. She was formerly the director of the Center for World Cultures at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Interests:
Accounting Information Systems
Systems/Project D
Management Information Systems
evelopment
Dr. Pennington is a specialist on intercultural communication and African-American culture, the cultural discourse on trauma/terror and has taught courses on the Rhetoric of African Americans, the Black Woman, Black Male and Female Communications, among others.
Dr. Peterson's research focuses on aspects of the geography of biodiversity. His formal training was in tropical ornithology, with a particular focus on systematics
David Roediger is the Foundation Professor of American Studies at University of Kansas where he teaches and writes on race and class in the United States. Educated through college at public schools in Illinois, he completed doctoral work at Northwestern University. His recent books include Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All, How Race Survived U.S. History, and (with Elizabeth Esch) The Production of Difference. His older writings on race, immigration, and working class history include The Wages of Whiteness and Working toward Whiteness.
Cultural and Social History of 20th Century Latin America; Urban Sociology and Urban History; and Labor and Working-Class History of Latin America.
His interests include: Latin America (Mexico, Central America, Caribbean); history of race (intellectual and social development); African Diaspora in Latin America, indigenous history (ethnohistory of Mesoamerica).
Professor Teruna Siahaan earned a B.S. and an M.S. from the University of Indonesia and a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Interests:
- Culture
- Urbanism
- Vernacular architecture
- Historic preservation
- Heritage management
- World Heritage
- Environment-behavior studies
David Smith is a specialist in sociological theory who studies inequality and the psychology of inequality. His writings include publications on classical and critical social theory, anti-Semitism, authority, authoritarianism, charisma, genocide, the Rwandan genocide, capitalism, and labor.
Luciano Tosta has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and Master's degrees in Comparative Literature and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Brown University. Dr. Tosta also has a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he was a Fulbright scholar. Prof. Tosta did his undergraduate studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, where he earned a Bachelor degree and a Licenciatura in English. Before joining the faculty at the University of Kansas, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
María Velasco is a Spanish-born artist who has been living and working in the USA since the 1990s. Her interdisciplinary work consists of site-specific environments, sculptural objects, and temporary public art commissions.
Tom Volek spent 15 years in commercial television and then entered academe. He has worked extensively with Russian journalism schools on their emerging market-based media, and the U.S. military on military-media issues.
Professor Warren's research interests include the history of gender and race in African American and Native American education, Kansas, and the United States. Her teaching interests include women's history, citizenship and American identity, race and gender relations, identity development in the African Diaspora, as well as social, civil rights, and reform movements. Warren regularly offers service-learning options in her upper-level women's history course; a link to her electronic course poster in the Center for Teaching Excellence gallery can be seen here.
Jide Wintoki's research interests include empirical corporate finance (especially corporate governance), international finance and applied econometrics.
Dr. Omaris Z. Zamora is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar. Her research interests include: Black and Latino Studies, transnational Hispanic Caribbean cultural production as they relate to race, gender, and sexuality. Her current book project engages the theoretical formation of AfroLatina feminist epistemologies through an analysis of transnational Dominican women’s narratives in literature and performance.
Professor Ajayi-Soyinka has joint appointments in Theatre Department and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) departments. As interdisciplinary scholar, her teaching, research publications and creative works encompass theatre, performance, literary, and gender studies, including the critical theories that inform them.
Research Areas: medical anthropology, semiotics, violence, trauma and healing; Central Africa, Euro-American Mennonites
John M. Janzen researches and writes on the socio-cultural dimensions of African health and healing, and theoretical issues in medical anthropology. He has studied healing traditions in Africa, their characteristics and interactions between them. In projects and works-mainly in Central Africa-- he has explored the construction of healing narratives and institutions.
Beverly Mack is a Professor Emeritus of African Studies in the Department of African and African American Studies. She regularly taught the following courses: Women and Islam, Muslim Women's Autobiography, African Women Writers, and Islamic (Sufi) Literature. Prior to joining KU, Professor Mack taught at Yale University (Hausa language and African Literature), Georgetown University (African History), and George Mason University (African Literature).
Mahmoud M. Ali is a lecture and coordinator of the Arabic Program. He received his MA in linguistics from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. He has also studied English language & literature, German and Arabic for his BA degree in his home country, Egypt. He has worked as English instructor at Defense Language Institute (Egypt) and Al-Baha University (Saudi Arabia), and as Arabic instructor at Ohio University. Mahmoud has done research on conceptual transfer, non-native English speech assessment as well as dialect perception and identification. He is also interested in foreign language pedagogy and proficiency assessment.
Ibrahima Ba holds a PhD in Linguistics from KU. He focuses on phonetics, phonology, syntax, and second language acquisition.
Dylan Bassett has been the director of the African Drum Ensemble at KU since it was created in 2007 through the Kansas African Studies Center. Dylan is a composer, percussionist, and teacher. He holds a BA in Music and an MA in Global and International Studies.
Christine V. Bourgeois came to the University of Kansas after completing her doctoral work at Princeton University in May of 2014. She specializes in the Francophone and Occitan traditions of the Middle Ages, with particular interest in the interconnection between medieval and modern narrative traditions. Her current book project, Saintly Asceticism and the Literary Machine: The Many Lives of Saint Anthony the Great, is a literary history of sanctity through the perspective of the Anthony tradition, spanning the Middle Ages to the beginning of the the twentieth century.
Dekow graduated from Grand View University in Iowa with degrees in Human Services and Political Science and a concentration in Public Administration. He earned a Master of Public Policy and Administration from Drake University. He also received his MBA from West Texas A&M University.
