About the Contributors
- About the Contributors
Semeneh Ayalew is a researcher in the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and a PhD candidate at the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, Uganda. His research interests include urban culture, revolution, revolutionary terminology, and revolutionary consciousness in twentieth century Ethiopia and Africa.
Wendy Laura Belcher is an assistant professor of African literature in the Department of Comparative Literature and Center for African American studies at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought in the Making of an English Author (2012). She is currently completing, with Michael Kleiner, a translation of an early modern hagiography of an Ethiopian woman called the Gädlä Wälättä P̣əṭros, an article on representations of slavery in eighteenth century Ethiopian texts, and a book about the circulation of ideas about an African Queen of Sheba.
Shimelis Bonsa is a graduate of Addis Ababa University (BA and MA) and the University of California, Los Angeles (PhD). He was a faculty member at the Addis Ababa University for more than ten years. Currently he teaches at SUNY Stony Brook. A student of modern Ethiopian and African history, he has undertaken research, combining fieldwork and archives, on issues [End Page 233] ranging from the media and gender to city and the state. His research interest revolves around the study of post-colonial formations including transnational identities, ideologies, and discourses. His recent interrogations include the study of state and society, especially of cities, in Ethiopia. He has published a monograph The State of the Private Press in Ethiopia (2000) and a number of articles including “A History of Kistane Migration to 1974” (Azania and The Urban Experience in Eastern Africa, 2002). Currently, he is preparing a book, City as Nation, a multidisciplinary study of the role of cities, especially the capital, in the shaping of modern Ethiopia and its modernist state.
Katrin Bromber received her PhD in African linguistics from the University of Leipzig and her habilitation degree from the University of Vienna. She specialized in Swahili studies and currently works on the social history of sports in Ethiopia and the Gulf States. She is a senior researcher at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies (ZMO) in Berlin. Her books include The Jurisdiction of the Sultan of Zanzibar and the Subjects of Foreign Nations (2001), Imperial Propaganda. The East African Military Press in World War II (2009), and Globalisation and African Languages. Risks and Benefits (2004; co-edited with Birgit Smieja).
Christian S. Davis holds a PhD in history from Rutgers and is an Assistant Professor of History at James Madison University. He is the author of Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2012), which examines the domestic ramifications of colonial empire in modern Germany before 1914, showing how the project of overseas colonization affected its German-Jewish participants and contemporaneous antisemitic discourses and fantasies. He is currently studying the continued relationship between colonialism and antisemitism in Germany in the decade before the establishment of the Third Reich. His work also appears in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and the Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute.
Andreas Eshete studied philosophy at Williams College and Yale University. He has taught at a number of American universities, among them: Brown, UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Penn. He has published work in moral and political philosophy. Outside philosophy, he has written extensively on Ethiopia. [End Page 234] Positions in public service include: Chair, Panel of Experts, Federalism Forum—a biennial international conference of all federative countries held in Africa for the first time in 1910, hosted by Ethiopia (1990 –); Association for the Return of the Maqdala Ethiopian Treasures (1998 –present); Chair, African Institute for Democratic Deliberation and Action (1999 –present); Chair, Commemoration of the Centennial of the Battle of Adwa (1995– 1996); Coordinator for Constitutional and Governance Issues, Inter-Africa Group (1992–1995); President of Addis Ababa University until March 2011; Chair, Interim Board of the African Union Human Rights Memorial Project (2011–); CEO, Tana High Level Forum (2012–present). He is Professor of Law and Philosophy, UNESCO Chair for Human Rights, Peace and Democracy, and now Advisor to the...
