Remembering Tim Carmichael (1969–2018)

We are sad to announce the passing of Dr. Tim Carmichael, associate professor of history at the College of Charleston and long-time member of the editorial team at Northeast African Studies, where he served as Book Review Editor and most recently as Managing Editor. On February 9, Tim succumbed to stage four, terminal pancreatic cancer. Tim's passing is a tremendous loss to his family and friends, to a large set of devoted students, and to the broader community of Africanist scholars, particularly those engaged with the Horn of Africa.

Tim spent much of his childhood overseas, largely in Saudi Arabia, which had a huge influence on his orientation to the world. His professional trajectory was molded by his experiences as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, where he immersed himself in African history with a specific focus on Ethiopia. He was recruited to Michigan State University for graduate study by Professor Harold Marcus, who in 1978 had launched the publication Ethiopianist Notes, the forerunner of Northeast African Studies. Tim would later help edit and contribute a chapter to a collection of essays in honor of Professor Marcus: Personality and Political Culture in Modern Africa (Boston, 1998).

Tim had an unusual talent in critical languages—Amharic, Arabic, and Swahili. In addition to a number of important translation projects, he tackled tough and challenging research topics, including the relationship of Harar to the Ethiopian state during the reign of Haile Selassie, which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation completed in 2001. Tim was at the center of MSU's African History graduate program at the height of its distinction and won a host of fellowships (Fulbright, SSRC, and Wenner-Gren, among others).

Following terms as visiting assistant professor at Smith College and Michigan State University, Tim took up his position at the College of Charleston, where he became a core member of its African Studies Program and served for several years as its director. He leaves behind a remarkable legacy as a teacher and a scholar. At Charleston, he provided foundational courses in African Civilizations and Modern African History, along with others which reflected his long-standing research interests: Ethiopia Through the Ages, Islam in African History, and Drugs in World History. As evidence of his commitment to motivating undergraduates to share in his love for Africa, Tim would often teach extra (and unrewarded) classes in Kiswahili. One of his greatest unfulfilled ambitions was to have the College of Charleston become a regional center of African Studies, with Kiswahili courses as a main feature.

Tim also leaves the broader scholarly community with a rich set of contributions to the Horn of Africa's history and historiography, including original articles on linguistic aspects of qat culture, popular discourses about Islam in Ethiopian history, and the interface between literacy and orality in Ethiopia's bureaucratic culture. His translations of and commentaries on unpublished archival documents—a collection of Emperor Haile Selassie's personal correspondence, and a handwritten Arabic version of a 1947 Somali Youth League Constitution found in the Security Archives in Harar—pointed researchers to new sources and new avenues of investigation for the region's "internal" history in the twentieth century.

Above all, Tim's fierce devotion to justice led him to testify on multiple occasions before the Department of Homeland Security on behalf of asylum seekers, particularly from the Horn of Africa. This impetus to protect some of the world's most vulnerable people from persecution made Tim an example to follow, and he earned great respect from both the scholarly and policy-making communities with whom he interacted.

As an astute and sensitive observer of Ethiopian culture, politics, and society, Tim became an invaluable resource for younger scholars beginning their research and an esteemed professional colleague amongst established scholars. Professor Emeritus Bahru Zewde shared with us his deep sense of bereavement at Tim's loss, noting that Tim was "a fine scholar who combined erudition with grace. His mastery of Amharic and other Ethiopian languages gave him a rare insight into the intricacies of Ethiopian history. I recall the many pleasant hours that he, our late mutual...