Faculty Honors Fall 2012 | Center for African Studies

Faculty Honors

Richard Akresh, Economics, published the following this semester:

“Wars and Child Health: Evidence from the Eritrean-Ethiopian Conflict”(with Leonardo Lucchetti and Harsha Thirumurthy),Journal of Development Economics; “Child Ability and Household Human Capital Investment Decisions in Burkina Faso”(with Emilie Bagby, Damien de Walque, and Harounan Kazianga), in Economic Development and Cultural Change and “War and Stature: Growing Up During the Nigerian Civil War”(with Sonia Bhalotra, Marinella Leone, and Una Osili), American Economic Review (Papers & Proceedings).

In addition, he presented a paper on "Child Labor, Schooling, and Child Ability" at the Northeast Universities Development Conference in November.

Teresa Barnes, History. won a UIUC Research Board travel and research assistance grant for her work on “Apartheid’s Professor: AH Murray and complicity in South African higher education, 1959-70." She also had “History and Ordinary Womanhood,” published in Historical Reflections and made a number of presentations:

“Solidarity Begins at Home: expatriate anti-apartheid activism in Harare, Zimbabwe in the 1980s,” African Studies Association Annual Meeting; “This is not the country I ruined my life for’: South African history and the politics of disappointment,” presented to the African-American and African Studies Program, Michigan State University; and“Good liberal, bad liberal: problems of complicity in South Africa,” presented to the African Studies Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also served as moderator for a public forum at UIUC entitled "Marikana: The Implications for South African democracy." She continued to serve on the Board and executive committee of the African Studies Association (ASA) and has been chosen to the Board of the Association of Concerned African Scholars.

Val Beasley, Emeritus of Veterinary, Wildlife, and Ecological Toxicology, gave a talk at the 50th Anniversary of Silent Spring in Patuxent, MD, where Rachel Carson worked (http://www.rachelcarsoncouncil.org/index.php?page=50th-anniversary-speakers).

Tom Bassett, Geography and Geographic Information Science, had a number of publications this term including: B. Beymer-Farris and T. Bassett. 2012. The REDD Menace: Resurgent protectionism in Tanzania’s mangrove forests. Global Environmental Change ; T. Bassett and. M. Koné. 2012. Intégrer l’écologie dans la political ecology: feuxde brousse et emissions de gaz à effet de serre dans le nord de la Côte d’Ivoire. In D. Gauiter and T. Benjaminsin (Eds.) Environnement, discours et pouvoir. L’approche Political Ecology. Editions Quae: Paris; B. Beymer-Farris, T. Bassett, and I. Bryceson 2012. Promises and pitfalls of adaptive management in resilience thinking: the lens of political ecology in T. Plieninger and C. Bieling (Eds.) Resilience and the Cultural Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Francis A. Boyle, Law, signed a contract with Clarity Press for the publication of his 16th book, tentatively entitled "Libya: Destroying World Order (1981-2011)." The book should be in print sometime during the summer of 2013.

James Brennan, History, announced the publication of his book, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania, in June of this year; he also won an American Society of Learned Societies (ACLS) Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship for 2012-2015 for his political biography project on Oscar Kambona. Dr. Brennan also became co-editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies (JEAS) in January 2012.

Philip Graham, Creative Writing, and Alma Gottlieb, Anthropology, co-authored a memoir of life among the Beng. The book, Braided Worlds, is a sequel to Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa (which won the Victor Turner Award in 1993). The authors have dedicated their royalties to the community that is the subject of Braided Worlds: the Beng people, who have faced tremendous difficulties after Côte d’Ivoire’s nearly two decades of intermittent civil war. In Braided Worlds, they document the process of dedicating the profits from their first memoir (Parallel Worlds) to the Beng in the 1990s, which included providing a multi-purpose mill in one village (Asagbé), and repairing a water pump in another village (Kosangbé). In addition, Philip Graham had a number of publications in various media. These included: "The Madman and the Seismograph," on Numéro Cinq, Online: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2012/09/17/the-madman-and-the-seismograph-nonfiction-alma-gottlieb-philip-graham/; "My Father's African Afterlife," on McSweeneys/ Internet Tendency. Online: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/my-fathers-african-afterlife; "The Picky Eater and the African Food Fairy," on Leite's Culinaria,Oct. 18, 2012. Online: http://leitesculinaria.com/82262/writings-the-picky-eater.html

Al Kagan, Library, published “Selected Internet Sources for the Study of Africa." African Research & Documentation, no. 117.

James Kilgore, Center for African Studies, presented his paper, “From Fugitive to Fiction Writer” at the University of Pretoria, University of Johannesburg and at the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal during the summer. He also published his third novel, Prudence Couldn’t Swim.

Bekisizwe S. Ndimande, Curriculum and Instruction, was invited to give the inaugural Gershman/Ahler Distinguished Lecture in Qualitative Research at the University of North Dakota entitled: “Decolonizing research in post-apartheid South Africa: The politics of methodology.”

Jesse Ribot, Geography and Beckmann Institute, published with Agrawal, Arun, Maria Carmen Lemos, Ben Orlove. "Cool Heads for a Hot World--Social Sciences under a Changing Sky" in Global Environmental Change; “Reducing REDD risks: Affirmative” (with Ann Larson); and Elizabeth Marino contributed to a special issue of Global Environmental Change“ with "Adding Insult to Injury: Climate Change, Social Stratification, and the Inequities of Intervention.”

ISIP Africa Initiative Awards

We congratulate the following faculty who recently received Illinois Strategic International Partnerships (ISIP) Africa Initiative grants. The Principal Investigators and project titles were:

Jonathan Makela (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Installation and Operation of a Remote Equatorial Nighttime Observatory of Ionospheric Regions (RENOIR) site at the Observatoire Astronomique.

Thomas Bassett (Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science), A Tough Nut to Crack: Cashews and Rural Household Incomes in Cote d'Ivoire.

Paul McNamara (Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics), Agribusiness for Development and Food Security in Sierra Leone.

The goal of ISIP's Africa Initiative is to develop sustained partnerships with institutions of higher education in Africa.

CAS Core and Affiliate Faculty Voted As Excellent Teachers:

Spring and Summer 2012

Richard Akresh, Economics
Manisha Basu, English
Abbas, Benmamoun, Linguistics
Jan Brooks, Human and Community Development
Brian Dill, Sociology
Mark Dressman, Curriculum and Instruction
Alain Fresco, French
Alan Hansen, Agricultural and Biological Engineering
Patrick Keenan, Law
Cynthia Oliver, Dance
Ryan Shosted, Linguistics
Medu Viswanathan, Business
Timothy Wedig, Global Studies
Alex Winter-Nelson, Agricultural and Consumer Economics
Assata Zerai, Sociology

Our Teaching GAs Ranked As Excellent

Mor Gueye, Wolof
Anne Lutomia, Swahili
H. Wane, Materials Science and Engineering