Brooke Schwartz Bocast is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and affiliate faculty in African Studies. An interdisciplinary scholar, she works at the intersections of anthropology, African studies, gender and sexuality studies, and broadly across the humanities. Her debut monograph, If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood in the New East Africa, was awarded the Council on Anthropology and Education’s Outstanding Book Award. She currently researches and organizes with diaspora activists in Uganda’s National Unity Platform/People Power Freedom Movement. By tackling paradoxes around transnational movements, diaspora solidarities and tensions, and mediated activism, this project offers a unique vantage onto opposition political praxis in an era of rising global authoritarianism. Dr. Bocast’s research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the Institute for International Education. Her writing appears in City & Society, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Anthropology & Humanism, and other scholarly, literary, and public venues.
Bryan Kauma is an Assistant Professor of History at Southwestern University. His research interests focus on the food and environmental history of southern Africa from the pre-colonial past to the present. He demonstrates how power is intertwined and embedded in the everyday political, social, and economic landscapes of food and crop production, distribution, and consumption in African society. He uses food narrative to re-examine Africa’s past, unpacking the myriad topical, emotive, and contested themes, including race, colonialism, agrarian systems, African peasantry, food security, indigeneity, and agency.
Daniel Van Lehman is a Visiting Scholar in the Middle East Studies Center at Portland State University where he researches and publishes on Somali Bantu demographics and human rights including: “The Somali Bantu: Their History and Culture” and “Somalia’s Southern War: The Fight over Land and Labor in Southern Somalia.” Mr. Van Lehman was a United Nations Field Officer in Kenya and Mozambique and speaks a Somali language–Swahili–which he learned as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya. Daniel Van Lehman has a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Illinois University and a master’s degree from Cornell University.
Daren Ray is an Associate Professor of African history at Brigham Young University. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. He is the author of Ethnicity, Identity and Conceptualizing Community in Indian Ocean East Africa (Ohio University Press, 2024).
David Bresnahan is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Utah. He is the author of Inland from Mombasa: East Africa and the Making of the Indian Ocean World (University of California Press, 2025). His other work has appeared in the Journal of World History, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies.
David Morton, Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver, is a historian of southern Africa, African urbanism, and decolonization, with specific expertise in informal settlement and the histories of Mozambique and its capital Maputo. He is the author of Age of Concrete: Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique (Ohio UP, 2019) and has contributed to the Journal of Contemporary History, the Journal of African History, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and Cities, among other publications.
Derrick Sarpong Owusu is a master’s student in the History Department at Idaho State University, where he also serves as a Graduate Teaching Assistant. He is interested in African history with a thematic focus on the history of medicine, science, and technology. He is a co-author of the chapter “Interest Groups and COVID-19 in Africa (2019-2022)” in The COVID-19 Aftermath. Volume I: Ongoing Challenges (Springer, 2024), among other publications.
Haruka Nagao is an Assistant Professor in the Global Studies Department at the University of Oregon. She/They received a PhD in Political Science from the University of Kansas. Her/Their research focuses on Africa-China relations, health politics, gender and politics. Her/their articles have appeared on journals, including Democratization, International Political Science Review, Party Politics, Journal of Chinese Political Science, Social Indicators Research, and Journal of Modern African Studies.
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué is a historian specializing in women’s and gender history in mid-20th-century West Africa. Her book, Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon, was published in 2019 by the University of Michigan Press. She also co-edits a book series on women and gender in Africa for the University of Wisconsin Press.
Jodie Marshall is a postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University. She received her PhD in African History from Michigan State University. Her research is on migration and gender in Eastern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean, and she is working on her first book on the emotive and social transnational connections created by migrants living between Zanzibar and Oman.
Julie Weiskopf is a social historian of colonial and postcolonial Tanzania currently writing a book on Tanzania’s national adult literacy campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. Her past work has explored histories of resettlement, medicine, and wildlife conservation. In addition to her work in the History Department, she is the chair of International Studies and a Fulbright Program Advisor at Gonzaga.
Julie M. Weise is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. Her first book, Corazón de Dixie: Mexicanos in the U.S. South since 1910 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), received an award from the Organization of American Historians among other honors. Thanks to NEH OpenBook, the e-book of Corazón de Dixie is now available for free. Weise’s current project, “Guest Worker: Lives across Borders in an Age of Prosperity,” explores the histories of transborder labor migrants in the Americas, Europe, and southern Africa. Together with colleagues in Europe and Malawi, she created http://matchona.org, the first online repository of oral history interviews with Malawians on the move in twentieth century southern Africa.
Lacy Ferrell is an Associate Professor of History at Central Washington University. Her research focuses on childhood and education in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ghana.
Lanie Millar is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Oregon, where she specializes in Luso-Afro-Brazilian and Latin American culture. She is the author of Forms of Disappointment: Cuban and Angola Narrative After the Cold War (2019) and editor and co-translator with Fabienne Moore of The Revolution Will Be a Poetic Act: African Culture and Decolonization by Mário Pinto de Andrade (2024).
Leslie Hadfield has been teaching African history at BYU since 2010 and served as BYU’s Africana Studies Program Coordinator from 2017-2024. Hadfield primarily studies South African contemporary social and political history. Her research interests include South African liberation movements and the experience of black nurses in the Eastern Cape. She has also worked on the history of Kilimanjaro mountain crews. Oral history is an important part of her work. She conducted interviews in in both English and the Xhosa language for her book projects: Liberation and Development: Black Consciousness Community Programs in South Africa (MSU Press, 2016) and A Bold Profession: African Nurses in Rural Apartheid South Africa (UWP, 2021; HSRC Press, 2024). She speaks Swahili and has been involved in the African refugee community in Salt Lake City as well as the local Ngoma Y’Africa Cultural Center. Hadfield earned her PhD in African history at Michigan State University.