Serving through 2027
I am a professor of history and, as of July 2018, chair of the history department at UNC-Chapel Hill, where I have taught since 1999. I was trained as a historian of Africa, and my dissertation/first book investigated changing gender relations under colonialism in southwestern Nigeria. I then began to focus on the Atlantic slave trade, and I published a textbook on that topic. Most recently, I published a “life and times” biography of a 19th century African American who made a life and founded a dynasty in West Africa, encountering and shaping some of the major dynamics in the Atlantic world. I have conducted research in Ibadan and Lagos, Nigeria (totaling about 2-3 years over the last 20), as well as Liberia, the UK, and the US; I have also spent time in South Africa, Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Though I have not published on the topic, I am also interested in African pop music, especially from the 1960s through the 1990s.