Editorial Board

	Emmanuel K. Akyeampong ‌Professor Akyeampong is Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies and Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies. He joined the history faculty upon receiving his PhD in African history from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received an MA from Wake Forest University in 1989, where he concentrated on English labor history, and a BA in history and religions from the University of Ghana in 1984. At Harvard, Professor Akyeampong is the faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a board member of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. As a former chair of the Committee on African Studies, he has been instrumental, along with Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., in creating the Department of African and African American Studies. His publications include Dictionary of African Biography (2011), which he coedited with Professor Gates; Themes in West Africa’s History (2005), which he edited; Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850 to Recent Times (2001); and Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Present Times (1996). He was a coeditor of The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself and Other Writings, published this year, and provided an editor’s note for Adu Boahen’s Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante-British War of 1900–1.

	Simon Gikandi Professor Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies. Before that he was Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and the director of the Program in Comparative Literature. Gikandi was elected second vice president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in December 2016. He will become first vice president of the MLA in 2018 and the association’s president in 2019. He served as editor of PMLA, the official journal of the MLA, from 2011 to 2016. Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Gikandi earned his bachelor’s degree in literature, with first-class honors, from the University of Nairobi. As a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, he graduated with an MLitt in English studies. He has a PhD in English from Northwestern University. He is the author of many books and articles, including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and the literary study Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. He is the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945, the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature, and the coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. His book Slavery and the Culture of Taste was winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award and the Melville J. Herskovits Prize, given by the African Studies Association for the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English; and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He is the editor of The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, volume eleven of the Oxford History of the Novel in English.

	John M. Mugane Professor Mugane is a linguist specializing in African languages and is the Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures at Harvard University. He is also the director of the African Language Program in the Department of African and African American Studies. Mugane has been the director of the language program since 2003, developing the teaching of African languages and cultures. Mugane received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Arizona in 1997 and his MA in linguistics from Ohio University in 1991. A graduate of Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya, with a BEd in languages, literature, and linguistics in 1987, he also earned an MA in international affairs, African studies in 1991 at Ohio University. He is the author of The Story of Swahili (2015); Linguistic Typology and Representation of African Languages: Trends in African Linguistics #5 (2003); Tujifunze Kiswahili Let’s Learn Swahili (1999); and A Paradigmatic Grammar of Gikuyu: Stanford Monographs on African Languages (1997). Mugane’s current projects include the Africa’s Sources of Knowledge Digital Library (Project ASK-DL) and the ELIAS (Enhanced Language Instruction for African Studies) project.

	Paul Tiyambe Zeleza Professor Zeleza is vice chancellor and professor of the humanities and social sciences at the United States International University-Africa, in Nairobi, Kenya. Prior to joining USIU-Africa on January 1, 2016, he was vice president of Academic Affairs and professor of history at Quinnipiac University. Previously he was dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and the President’s Professor of History and African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He also served as head of the Department of African American Studies and the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, taught at the Pennsylvania State University, and was director of the Center for African Studies and professor of history and African studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before coming to the United States in 1995, he was college principal and professor of history and development studies at Trent University. Earlier he worked at the University of Malawi, University of the West Indies, and Kenyatta University. In 2006 he was appointed honorary professor at the University of Cape Town. In fall 2015, he was a fellow at Harvard University. Professor Zeleza earned his BA with distinction from the University of Malawi and an MA from the University of London, where he studied African history and international relations. He holds his PhD in economic history from Dalhousie University. He has published more than three hundred journal articles, book chapters, reviews, short stories and online essays, and authored or edited twenty-seven books, several of which have won international awards, including Africa’s most prestigious book prize, the Noma Award, for his books A Modern Economic History of Africa(1993) and Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (1997). His most recent books include In Search of African Diasporas: Testimonies and Encounters (2012), Africa’s Resurgence: Domestic, Global and Diaspora Transformations(2014), and The Transformations of Global Higher Education, 1945–2015 (2016).

	Jok Madut Jok Professor Jok is a professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. He is a widely recognized specialist on the violence and conflict that has racked his homeland of South Sudan. He chairs the board of the Sudd Institute, a public policy research center based in South Sudan. Following the independence of South Sudan in 2011, Professor Jok served for two years in the newly formed government of South Sudan as an undersecretary in the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. He was educated in Egypt, Sudan, and the United States and holds a PhD in the anthropology of health from the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Jok has received fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the Rift Valley Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Center. He is the author of numerous articles covering gender, sexuality and reproductive health, humanitarian aid, the ethnography of political violence, gender-based violence, war and slavery, and the politics of identity in what used to be the Sudan, and books including Sudan: Race, Religion and Violence (2007) and War and Slavery in Sudan (2001), and he is the coeditor of The Sudan Handbook (2010).