Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Jan Abbink, Professor of African Studies, VU University, Amsterdam, and senior researcher, African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands, has carried out fieldwork with Beta Israel in Israel, with various ethnic groups in Southern Ethiopia, and on political culture and religious relations in Ethiopia. He is the author of some 150 articles and of several monographs and edited works, among them (with Ineke van Kessel) Vanguard or Vandals. Politics, Youth and Conflict in Africa (Brill, 2005). He has received research grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, CNRS, and several Dutch academic foundations. In spring 2007 he was a visiting professor at the Asia–Africa Institute of Hamburg University, Germany.
Getatchew Haile, Curator of the Ethiopian Study Center and Regents Professor of Medieval Studies at St. John's University, is a scholar of Ethiopian literature and history who arrived in the United States in 1976. A MacArthur Fellow and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Dr. Getatchew is a former member of the Ethiopian Parliament and a leading figure in the Ethiopian diaspora. Among his recent scholarly publications are his editions and translations of The Gə'əz Acts of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende (2006) and The Mariology of Zär'a Ya'əqob of Ethiopia (1992).
Nancy J. Hafkin worked for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa, for twenty-five years, establishing the program to promote information technology for African development. Since her retirement and return to the United States, she has been Director of Knowledge Working, writing on information technology in developing countries, with particular emphasis on gender issues. Her recent publications include Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study (USAID, 2001); Cinderella or Cyberella: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society (Kumarian Press, 2006); and Engendering the Knowledge Society: Measuring the Participation of Women (ORBICOM, 2007). In 2000 the Association for Progressive Communication established an annual Nancy Hafkin Prize for creativity in information technology in Africa. [End Page 389]
Marilyn Heldman is an art historian/curator and expert on Ethiopian painting, architecture, and manuscript illumination whose work has revealed the dialogue of Ethiopian arts with traditions abroad, including those of the Eastern Mediterranean world and of Europe. Heldman is the author of African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia (Yale UP, 1993) and The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre Seyon (Harrassowitz, 1994), as well as of numerous articles. She has been a Fellow at the Harvard Center of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, and the recipient of foundation grants including the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Steven Kaplan is Gail Levin de Nur Professor of Comparative Religion and Academic Director of the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A scholar of African religions in general and of Ethiopian Christianity and Judaism in particular, Kaplan has published books and articles spanning a wide range of topics including the history of Ethiopian monasticism and studies of Ethiopian historical and religious texts, as well as extensive fieldwork and oral histories among the large Ethiopian (Jewish) community in Israel. He is currently researching Ethiopian Christian cultural adaptation in the United States.
Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago, is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (U of Chicago P, 1965) and Greater Ethiopia (U of Chicago P, 1974; 2nd ed., 2000), Levine has recently turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University in 2004.
Terrence Lyons, Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, specializes in comparative politics and international relations. A former fellow of the Brookings Institution Foreign Policy Studies Program, Lyons has authored books, articles, and working papers on politics, conflict, and society in contemporary Africa, including (with Christopher Mitchell, Tamra Pearson d'Estree, and Lulsegged Abebe) "The Ethiopian Extended Dialogue: An Analytical Report 2000–2003" (ICAR, 2004) and "Diasporas and Homeland Conflict" in Territoriality and...
