2021 Participant Biographies 

Nich Backman is an MA student in history at the University of Utah.

David Bresnahan is an assistant professor of history at the University of Utah. He holds a PhD from University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research has appeared in the Journal of East African Studies and the Journal of World History.   

Christopher Davey holds a PhD from the University of Bradford. His research has appeared in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. 

Leslie Hadfield is an associate professor of African history at Brigham Young University. She holds a PhD from Michigan State University, and is the author of African Nurses Working in Rural South Africa, 1960s-1990s (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2021). 

Myra Ann Houser is associate professor of history at Ouachita Baptist University. She is the author of Bureaucrats of Liberation: Southern African and American Lawyers During the Apartheid Era (Leiden University Press, 2020).  

Alírio Karina is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative at the University of Cape Town, and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Their research examines how the idea of Africa is the product of the legacies of anthropology, and what it might mean to do African studies—and to think Africa—in ways autonomous of anthropology. 

Doug Leonard is an assistant professor of history at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado. He holds a PhD from Duke University, and is the author of Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2020). 

Benjamin Lawrance a professor of history at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) and the Editor-in-chief of the African Studies Review. 

Abigail Meert is an assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University. She holds a PhD from Emory University. Her work has appeared in the International Journal of African Historical Studies. 

Daren Ray is an assistant professor of history at Brigham Young University. He holds a PhD from the University of Virginia. His research has appeared in the Muslim World Journal. 

Stephanie Wolfe is an associate professor of political science at Weber State University.She holds a PhD from the University of Kent, and is the author of The Politics of Reparations and Apologies (New York, NY: Springer, 2014).