Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Gbolahan Adeola was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. His interests, besides telling stories, include pretending to be a serious photographer. He is currently a student at Oberlin College, Ohio. Email: gbadeola@gmail.com
Molefi Kete Asante, MA, PhD, is Professor of African American Studies at Temple University, where he teaches Afrocentric theories and research and African American institutions and movements. Asante created the first doctoral program in African American Studies at Temple University in 1987. An award-winning teacher and writer, Asante has lectured on five continents and has held research and visiting positions in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, China, and South Africa. He is the author or editor of ninety-five books, including his landmark The Afrocentric Idea.
Joshua Bennett is an award winning performance poet from Yonkers, NY. He has recited his original works at The Sundance Film Festival, The NAACP Image Awards, The Kennedy Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Poetry Africa and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. He was a featured poet on the HBO series Russell Simmons presents Brave New Voices, and has been named one of TheRoot.com’s Top 30 performance poets. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English at Princeton University.
Ebony Coletu is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at The American University in Cairo. Her research interests in migration narratives and the practicalities of pan-Africanism were stimulated by family history and a rediscovered connection to Chief Alfred Sam. Email: coletu@aucegypt.edu
Jenny Davison is a recent graduate of Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has just returned from teaching in the remote Inuit community of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. The photographs she supplied to Transition were taken from her fieldwork in Ghana, where, in addition to assisting Dr. Jonathan Roberts in his work on Fort Metal Cross, she also participated in research on Ga witchcraft and curse trials in Accra. Email: jenny.davison@hotmail.com
Kendra Taira Field is Assistant Professor of History at Tufts University. She is currently completing a book, Growing Up with the Country: A Family History of Race and American Expansion.
Meshac Gaba investigates constructions of cultural identity along with systems of trade as they relate to exchanges between Africa and the Western world. Addressing ideas of [End Page 197] value and revaluation, perceptions of African art, the politics of museum display, and roles of both artist and visitor, Gaba inaugurated his major work, Museum of Contemporary African Art, in 1997. At once critical yet playfully sincere, this project addresses and overturns codes of national and shared identity, along with their inherent value, by blurring the political, the artistic, and the everyday. Born in Cotonou, Benin in 1961, Gaba currently lives and works between Cotonou and Rotterdam.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and American Research at Harvard University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of TheRoot.com and the author of sixteen books and thirteen documentaries, including the six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, for which he earned the 2013 Peabody Award and NAACP Image Award. Gates is currently shooting the next season of Finding Your Roots, airing on PBS in fall 2014. He is the recipient of fifty- three honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the MacArthur “genius grant.” He was named to Time’s “25 Most Influential Americans” list in 1997 and to Ebony’s “Power 150” list in 2009 and its “Power 100” list in 2010. The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of Gates’ essays, was published in 2012.
Rudolf P. Gaudio teaches anthropology at Purchase College, State University of New York, and was recently a Fulbright research scholar at the FCT College of Education, Zuba, Nigeria. He is the author of Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. His current research focuses on language, nation, and race in Nigeria’s planned modernist capital, Abuja.
Allison Janae Hamilton is a visual artist based in New York City. Hamilton was a 2013–2014 Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, sponsored by the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has exhibited...
