Adewale Onagbesan is a historian whose scholarship explores African history, with a focus on the history of health, medicine, disease control, and public health finance. He holds an MA in History and Strategic Studies and a BA(Ed) in History from the University of Lagos. Adewale has served as a research assistant to leading scholars across Nigeria, the U.S., and internationally, contributing to archival, ethnographic, and documentary projects. He has presented at prestigious conferences, including the Lagos Studies Association and EAHMH. Founder of The Matumaini Initiative, Adewale combines rigorous scholarship with community engagement to address socio-economic and historical issues.   

Adwoa Opong   

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.  

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.  

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.  

Doug Leonard is Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado. He holds a PhD from Duke University and teaches courses in African, Middle Eastern, intellectual, colonial, race, and gender history. He publishes widely on the intellectual history of North and West Africa and is the author of Anthropology, Colonial Policy and the Decline of French Empire in Africa (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2020) as well as a forthcoming book on the effects of non-linear temporalities on the post-colonial social and political opportunities in West Africa.  

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 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.  

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.  

Lindsay Frederick Braun (PhD Rutgers 2008) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. He studies the history of settler colonialism and knowledge and science in colonial settings from the 1700s to the 1900s, especially where it involves spatiality, struggles over land, and mapping activities. His work centers geographically in southern and eastern Africa, but not to the exclusion of other regions. 

Lynn M. Thomas is Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle (UW). She is the author of Politics of the Womb: Women, Reproduction, and the State in Kenya (2003) and Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners (2020), and a co-editor of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (2008) and Love in Africa (2009). She served as a co-editor of the Journal of African History (2010-15). Her current monograph project examines the transnational history of abortion technologies, practices, and politics between Kenya and the United States since the late 1960s.  

Marie Stango is Associate Professor of History and Director of the MA in History Program at Idaho State University. She researches gender, slavery, and connections between the U.S. and West Africa in the nineteenth century. Her work has appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists and Book History. She is finishing her book, Second Black Republic: Freedom and Family in the Making of Liberia. Stango teaches courses on women’s history, religion, and a course for teacher candidates on pedagogy, and she was named ISU’s Distinguished Teacher for 2024-2025, the highest teaching honor awarded to a faculty member at ISU.  

Stephen Dueppen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. His archaeological research focuses on socio-political histories in West Africa over the past 3,000 years. He is the author of Egalitarian Revolution in the Savanna: The Origins of a West African Political System (Equinox, 2012), Divine Consumption: Sacrifice, Alliance-Building and Making Ancestors in West Africa (UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, 2022), and numerous articles and book chapters.   

Trishula Patel is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Denver. She has a PhD in history from Georgetown University, an MS in journalism from Columbia University, and an MA and BA in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include race and segregation in Southern Africa, British colonialism in the Indian Ocean world, legal history, sports history, and South Asian diasporas in Africa. Her forthcoming book is the first comprehensive history of Indians in Zimbabwe, where she was born and raised.