From the Incoming Editor

With this volume of Northeast African Studies, the journal has a new executive editorial team. I am honored and excited to take upon myself the role of General Editor of this distinguished journal. It is also a pleasure to introduce our new Book Review Editor, Matteo Salvadore, whose energies and knowhow are already clearly manifested in this issue (with nine book reviews!).

Marking this year its forty years of existence (including a several year-long hiatus), Northeast African Studies is in excellent shape. I must also note that the role of editor is a meaningful one for me to take on as a former doctoral student of the journal’s founding editor, the late Harold Marcus. After several decades, Northeast African Studies maintains its place as a leading journal in the field. The robustness and strong reputation of the journal owes much to the dedication and vigor of our outgoing General Editor, Lee V. Cassanelli, who revived the journal in 2010 and expertly oversaw its publication for the past decade. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my deepest appreciation to Lee for his exemplary stewardship. Under Lee’s leadership, the journal has significantly expanded the diversity of both its authors and its readers, with a growing number of contributors—both established and upcoming—based in Africa, and also in Europe, in addition to those in North America. In terms of readership, too, Northeast African Studies has become the journal of choice for scholars and practitioners the world over, seeking the most cutting-edge scholarship on the region. Our appreciation and gratitude likewise goes to James De Lorenzi and the late Tim Carmichael who worked closely and indefatigably with Lee for the greater part of this past decade.

Looking ahead, my main goal as editor will be to maintain and buttress the journal as a pivotal platform of research in this area of scholarship and uphold the highest possible academic standards. We will continue to publish original research on the region drawing on new source material, sound documentation, fresh ethnographic research and innovative methodologies in a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. We likewise welcome those contributions which challenge older perspectives and paradigms in our own field, so as to advance and enrich it and bring it into line with the best scholarship produced on other parts of the world. We are particularly interested in contributions whose conceptual frameworks and approaches—be they comparative, interdisciplinary, transnational/transregional, global—help foster new encounters and conversations between our region and areas of research, on the one hand, and other world regions and their scholarly fields and literatures, on the other. Northeast African Studies aspires to take a leading role in expanding the region’s scholarly horizons and bringing new actors working in other parts of the world into its field of vision.

I believe that these are exciting times to study northeast Africa. It would be no exaggeration to say that in recent years Ethiopia, northeast Africa, and the Red Sea area’s noteworthy place and role in global history is gaining wider recognition and drawing growing scholarly attention. One can equally say that Ethiopia, as the region’s largest country and the second largest nation in an ever-more-dynamic and vibrant African continent, is captivating the curiosity and evoking the fascination that it deserves as an important player in tomorrow’s world.

More concretely, and in addition to those established areas of strength in our field, some exciting themes that I would like to see addressed in the pages of this journal include the manifold intersecting and connected histories of northeast Africa and other world regions in a variety of periods. Subjects that converse with global history approaches and that work towards debunking those antiquated perceptions that still perceive northeast Africa as somehow isolated from other parts of the world (including other parts of Africa) are particularly appreciated. There is, for example, exciting new work carried out on northeast Africa and the Global Middle Ages (including in this very issue!), as well as the region’s global connections, exchanges, and entanglements in the...