About the Contributors
- About the Contributors
Semeneh Ayalew Asfaw is an Ethiopian born in 1978 in Addis Ababa. He researches and lectures in history in the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Addis Ababa University. He earned his BA and MA from the Department of History, Addis Ababa University. Semeneh is currently Managing Editor of the Journal of Ethiopian Studies, one of the most highly reputed journals in Ethiopia, which has been in operation since 1963. His research interests are in the areas of urban culture, penal history in twentieth-century Ethiopia, the Ethiopian revolution, revolutionary terminology, and the history of Assab. He has attended numerous conferences in Europe and the United States and was one of the members of the organizing committee for the 17th International Conference on Ethiopian Studies.
Tibebe Eshete is is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Religious Studies, Michigan State University, East Lansing. He has been an Associate Professor of African History at Missouri State University and Calvin College. He has also taught at Asmara University and Addis Ababa University. He has published extensively on the Horn of Africa as it pertains to Ethio-Somali relations and on issues related to new religious movements in Ethiopia. His recent research interests have focused on social and cultural changes, youth movements, and the like. His publications include the following: The Silent Revolution (2001) and The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia (2009), which has been considered [End Page 159] as one of the most outstanding books of the year in the field of mission studies for 2009.
François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar is Research Director in African History at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Toulouse, France, and Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology, and Environmental Studies (GAES) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He previously served (2006-9) as Director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His research interests include the history and archaeology of ancient African societies, especially in Southern Africa, a topic to which he devoted several books and edited volumes such as Histoire de l'Afrique du Sud (2006), and (with Karim Sadr) Khoekhoe and the Origins of Herding in Southern Africa (2008). He is also the author of numerous scholarly publications on African medieval history, including publications on Christian and Muslim Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa.
Eloi Ficquet is the Director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa, an institution dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in the humanities and social sciences. He is also Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris. His research focuses on the encounters between Islam and Christianity and on the transformations of identities linked to these religions.
Bertrand Hirsch is Professor of Medieval African History at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. A specialist in the medieval history of the Horn of Africa, he is also working on the history of Sahelian kingdoms.
Douglas H. Johnson, a historian, is the author of Nuer Prophets (1994), The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars (2003, revised 2010), the editor of The Upper Nile Province Handbook (1995) and the Sudan volume in the British Documents on the End of Empire Project (1998), a former resource person at the Karen peace talks (2003), and an international expert on the Abyei Boundaries Commission (2005). [End Page 160]
Lidwien Kapteijns is Kendall/Hodder Professor of History at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she has taught African and Middle Eastern history for over 20 years. Before turning to Somali studies, she lived and worked in the Sudan and published widely on late precolonial Sudanese history. Women's Voices in a Man's World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Northern Somali Orature, c. 1899-1980 (1999, with Maryan Omar Ali) dealt with notions of proper womanhood in Somali folklore texts and the popular songs of the 1970s and 1980s. Her most recent publication is "Making Memories of Mogadishu in Somali Poetry about the Civil War," a chapter in the book entitled African Mediations of Violence: Fashioning New Futures from Contested Pasts, which she coedited...
