Faculty
Glenn Adams is the Interim Director of the Kansas African Studies Center since August 2021. He conducts research in African and other settings outside the Euro American mainstream of psychological science.
Katie Rhine is the Faculty Associate Director of the Kansas African Studies Center and an Associate Professor in the Department of African & African-American Studies and the Department of Geography & Atmospheric Science. 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.
Shawn Leigh Alexander's area of research concentration is African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
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.
Dr. Amal El Haimeur is a an Assistant Teaching Professor of Arabic, and the coordinator of the Arabic language.
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).
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 served as the Director of KASC since August 2013- August 2021.
Professor Obadare's reasearch focuses on: Transnational Migration, Comparative Societies, Civil Society, Social Change, and Development in Africa.
Hannington Ochwada is a lecturer of African History in the departments of History and of African and African-American Studies. Originally from Kenya and a native Kiswahili speaker, he has taught in the U.S for many years. His research focuses on gender and sexuality in East Africa and introduces students and community members to concepts of global Islam and religious syncretism.
Peter Ojiambo is an Associate Professor in the Department of African & African-American Studies and the former Faculty Associate Director of the Kansas African Studies Center. 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.
Dr. Nicole Hodges Persley is an award winning professor and director. She is an Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies who specializes areas of Hip-hop Studies, Acting and Directing and African American performance in theater, film and television. An artist-scholar, Hodges Persley creates intentional bridges between the entertainment industry and academia. She is the author of Sampling and Remixing Blackness in Hip Hop Performance and Breaking It Down: Auditioning for Artists of the Global Majority, co-written with Monica Ndounou of Dartmouth University
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.
James Yeku studies the digital expressions of the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora and focuses on the African articulations of the digital cultural record. His research also explores interdisciplinary areas such as cultural studies, social media in Africa, as well as visual culture in Nigeria.
Dr. Agusto's research work is focused on the use of mathematical and statistical modeling approaches to gain insight into the ecology and epidemiology of some emerging and re-emerging human and zoonotic disease of public health importance. She has designed and analyzed novel models for the dynamics of diseases such as Ebola, avian influenza, bovine tuberculosis, Johnes disease, toxplasmagondii, Chikungunya, and malaria.
Dean Akinwuntan is a world-leading authority on the use of virtual-reality technologies to improve daily living acitivities in neurologically impaired persons. Dr. Akinwuntan has collaborated extensively on several funded grants totaling mor than $15 million. He has authored more than 110 peer-viewed publications and abstracts, mostly in reputable journals with high impact factors, and authored 8 book chapters. He is also co-director of the Laboratory for Advanced Rehabilitation Research in Simulation.
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.
Meredith Bagwell-Gray, MSW, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas. With an emphasis on health equity research, Dr. Bagwell-Gray studies the intersections of race, gender, and age with environmental factors, like living in rural areas, and contextual factors, like experiencing intimate partner violence, on women’s health and safety.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Research interests: US empire, Working class studies, Race and racism, Transnational studies
Nishani Frazier is Associate Professor of American Studies and History at University of Kansas. Her research interests include 1960s freedom movements, oral history, food, digital humanities, and black economic development.
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
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.
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.
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. 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.
Her research combines interests in reproductive health and HIV to improve safer childbearing for people living with HIV. Dr. Kessler's actove studies focus on developing, evaluating, and adapting mHealth interventions like the HIV Infant Tracking System (HITSystem) to improve early infant diagnosis (EID) of HIV, and prevent perinatal HIV transmission among pregnant womwn in Kenya.
Dr. Koenig's scholarship and research interests involve gerontology, and professional ethical decision making in social work practice, women and feminist or critical theoretical perspectives, and international social work.
Julius Kyakuwa is an Assistant Professor of General Music Education at the University of Kansas, Division of Music Education and Music Therapy. Dr. Kyakuwa received his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, and both his Bachelor of Music Honors and Master of Music, cum laude, in Music Education from The University of Pretoria (UP) in South Africa. Dr. Kyakuwa’s research interests include community partnerships with schools, arts integration and creative teaching of music, multicultural and culturally responsive pedagogy, and music teacher education and professional development.
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.
Dr. Mabachi works in both the academic and community settings using her expertise in community based participatory research (CBPR), qualitative research methods, evaluation, and health communication to address a variety of health topics among vulnerable and underrepresented populations both locally in Kansas City and internationally in East Africa.
William Matney, assistant professor, joined the KU faculty in the fall of 2016. As a clinician, William has worked primarily in special education settings, where he developed programs with unique populations including children who have severe emotional and behavioral disorders and early childhood bilingual co-teach classes. He has also worked as a private practice clinician with a range of populations.
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.
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.
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.
M’Balia B. Thomas, holds a PhD from the Interdisciplinary Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching from the University of Arizona. As a Critical Applied Linguist, she investigates the everyday creativity of non-native and non-standard varieties of American English. She draws upon a variety of qualitative (discourse) approaches—CDA, Conversation Analysis, Corpus Analysis, Rhetorical and Stylistic Analyses, Self-Study, and Narrative Inquiry—to investigate language use as it surfaces in oral and written narratives. In her spare time, Dr. Thomas engages in scholarship in the area of Mindful & Contemplative Practices in Higher Education, as well as Harry Potter Studies.
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.
Fithawee Tzeggai studies the relationship between politics and knowledge in the arena of public education and social policy reform. His work explores how scholars and policy experts develop new ideas and evidence in response to public controversies, and it analyzes the impact that these ideas have on public policy and the politics of race and education. His current book project is titled Sanitizing Segregation: Social Science Expertise and the Limits of Liberal School Reform. In this study, he examines the development of education research during the civil rights movement to show how racial clashes in the 1960s shaped academic knowledge and public debate about segregation, integration, and racial equity in public school reform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Prof. Rosenthal's long-term research interests are primarily in the themes of urban public space, transportation, popular culture and streetlife in early 20th century Latin America, though he has also been publishing material on the worker press of the region and on teaching. He is developing an interest in the visual history of Latin America, particularly in the southern cone region, ranging into the contemporary period.
Ahmed Adly is a Foreign Language Teaching Assistant in the Arabic program. He is an EFL instructor. He holds a Master's Degree in Linguistics from Helwan University, Egypt, and a Bachelor's Degree in English Language and Literature from Sohag University, Egypt. His research interests include discourse analysis, cognitive semiotics, blending, visual metaphor, and humor.
Mahmoud M. Ali is a lecturer of Arabic. 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.
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.
Dr. Ben Baba earned her Ph.D. in Adult and Continuing Education and a master’s in urban and Community Planning from Auburn University. She earned an additional degree in Cultural Studies and a Bachelor in English Literature from Mohamed V University in Morocco. Dr Ben Baba’s research interests include online learning communities, online distance education learning environment in the foreign language classroom, the incorporation of cultural forms (films, literature, space, built environment, music, popular culture) in second language teaching and learning. Further teaching interests include Middle Eastern and North African sub-cultures, gender and diaspora.
Marie is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy Analysis at the Nelson Mandela College of Government and Social Sciences, Southern University & A&M College, Baton Rouge, LA. She holds an M.A. in Public Administration, from the same university, a B.A. in English Studies, African Literature and Civilization, from Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Senegal.
Marie has been teaching Wolof at KU since the Summer of 2019 and has previously taught Wolof at Southern University as a Fulbright FLTA and at the University of Florida. Marie’s research interests include second language acquisition and cultural awareness, gender and development, maternal health and child mortality. Her current research focuses on a spatial analysis of mental health expenditures in the State of Louisiana.
