presenters
Patricia Bentley
Patricia Bentley, BA, Hon. AOCAD, is a textile expert and an award winning museum education specialist and exhibition designer. In her position as Senior Curator at the Textile Museum of Canada, she develops and implements programs for children, students and lifelong learners. She has also curated and designed several exhibitions, including Drawing with Thread, The Lion King of Mali, Dance of Pattern, The Blues and The Cutting Edge. Bentley’s authoring projects for the Web include Canadian Tapestry: The Fabric of Cultural Diversity and the game and explore site In Touch: Communicating Cloth, Culture and Art. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies at York University, investigating magic squares from mathematical, artistic and sociocultural perspectives.
Orock Tanye Besongngem
Orocktanye Besongngem obtained a degree in Geography from the University of Dschang, Cameroon, in 1999. Since then he has been working as a social development research consultant with civil society organisations in Cameroon. His research interests have revolved around gender, culture, social welfare and environmental management. His paper titled 'The Ubiquitous "Classless" CICAM of Cameroon', written jointly with Dr. Emmanuel Nuesiri, is part of a research on women's empowerment in Cameroon implemented by the Centre d’Animation des Jeunes pour l’Appui au Développement (CAJAD). He is presently working on a research looking at gender disparity in Cameroon's labour policy.
Beth A. Buggenhagen
Beth A. Buggenhagen is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She has conducted fieldwork in Dakar and Tuba, Senegal, and in the North American cities of Chicago and New York City. Her current research interests include the politics of social production and value, material culture, visuality, gender, Islam, and globalization. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, Prophets and Profits: Gender and Islam in Global Senegal, which analyzes the multilayered connections of prophets and profits in the Senegalese postcolony to understand debates over women’s ritual and religious practices, family law and religious authority in an era of economic volatility.
Laura L. Cochrane
Laura L. Cochrane is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Central Michigan University. Her ongoing research is with weavers in Senegal, studying their discursive and material expressions of religious, ethnic, and national identities.
Soelve Curdts
Soelve Curdts has received her Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where her thesis won the award for the best dissertation in Comparative Literature. She has published on various authors including Dostoevsky, Wordsworth, Turgenev, Baudelaire, T.S. Eliot, Hegel and Flaubert. She is currently at work on a book entitled "The Graveyard of Europe" on Dostoevsky and modernity, especially shifting conceptions of identity and the historical. She has recently been invited to speak on historical vision in Dostoevsky and Coetzee at conferences of the International Comparative Literature Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She has held numerous fellowships including a fellowship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen volkes, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Graduate Prize Fellowship from the Princeton University Center for Human Values, a Dodds Honorific Fellowship from the Princeton Graduate School, and - most recently - a research fellowship from the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung.
Ferdinand de Jong
Ferdinand de Jong is an anthropologist who has conducted extensive fieldwork in Senegal, West Africa. He is currently writing a book on heritage and memory in postcolonial Senegal. In this book he focuses on World Heritage sites and the commemorations performed at these sites. Previously, De Jong researched masquerades and initiation ceremonies in Casamance, Senegal. While his major research interest was in the secrecy that pervades these practices, he has also published on globalisation, cultural politics and a Senegalese museum. In the future, he hopes to research cityscapes in the postcolony.
Jude Fokwang
Jude Fokwang received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and his MA from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Between 2008 and 2009, he held the position of senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town. He now teaches socio-cultural anthropology at the Oshawa Campus of Trent University. Fokwang is the author of Mediating Legitimacy (2009) a book on traditional leadership and democratisation in Africa. He has published extensively on youth activism, popular culture and citizenship in Africa. He is currently writing an ethnography on “associational life” in the Cameroon grassfields.
Silvia Forni
Silvia Forni holds a B.A. (Laurea), Philosophy, University of Turin, Italy, 1993; an M.A., Cultural Anthropology, Indiana University, IN., 1996 and Ph.D., Cultural Anthropology, University of Turin, Italy, 2001.
Dr. Silvia Forni is Associate Curator of Anthropology in the ROM’s Department of World Cultures. She is also cross appointed to the University of Toronto Anthropology Department where she teaches Anthropology of Art and Anthropology of Material Culture.
Before Dr. Forni’s arrival at the ROM in 2008, she taught anthropology of art at the University of Turin, Italy and was a consultant curator for ethnographic displays and temporary exhibitions. Her research focuses on the significance of art objects and material culture as part of a network of exchange that has played a crucial role in defining regional cultural identity in sub-Saharan Africa. She has conducted fieldwork in Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal and Ghana. Her research interests cover a range of topics such as gender, religion, and social change in different African settings and have been published in both English and Italian.
Samba Gadjigo
Dr. Samba Gadjigo is Professor of French and African literature at Mount Holyoke College at Mount Holyoke College. His research focuses on French-speaking Africa, particularly the work of filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. He is author of Ousmane Sembène, The Making of a Militant Artist ( 2010), Indiana University; Ecole blanche, Afrique noire: L'image de l'école coloniale dans le roman africaine francophone and editor of Ousmane Sembène: Dialogue with Critics and Writers. He has directed a documentary on Sembène's film, Moolaade.
Suzanne Gott
Suzanne Gott is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She has a Ph.D. in African Art History (Indiana University, Bloomington 2002) and a Ph.D. in Folklore (Indiana University, Bloomington, 1994). She is co-editor with Dr. Kristyne Loughran of the book, Contemporary African Fashion, in the Indiana University Press African Expressive Cultures series [October 2010 release], which includes her essay, “The Ghanaian Kaba: Fashion That Sustains Culture.” Additional publications include: “Asante High-timers and the Fashionable Display of Women’s Wealth in Contemporary Ghana” (Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture, 2009); and “The Power of Touch: Women’s Waist Beads in Ghana,” in Dress Sense: Emotional and Sensory Experiences of the Body and Clothes (Berg, 2007), edited by Donald Clay Johnson and Helen Bradley Foster. She served as guest curator for The Newark Museum exhibition, Glass Beads of Ghana (January 2008-March 2010) and Consulting Curator for the African Collection at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City (2006-2010).
Mary Hark
MFA: Art Institute of Chicago; Assistant Professor UW-Madison Design Studies, affiliated with UW-Madison Fine Art and African Studies Departments; Senior Fulbright Research Scholar Sub-Saharan Africa, 2006; Lectures and conducts workshops nationally(US); Exhibits internationally. Mary Hark is Affiliated with Kwame Nkurmah University of Science and Technology Department of Painting and Sculpture, Kumasi, Ghana.
Her work has recently been described by curator Jody Cowles: “Harks recent paintings combine handmade papers and cloth into an intricate ground, stitched together with thread and built up into a complex stratigraphy with paint, wax, textile dyes, inks, and pencil marks. Large in scale, they appear both delicate and resilient. Their layered surfaces invoke the patina of time: the slow, subtle erosion of a well-thumbed page, the careless beauty of mended clothing, the evocative fissures in an old painted wall.
Harks' dedicated study of both paper and textile techniques lends her surfaces a particular depth. She crosses traditional boundaries with knowledge and respect, creating a rich and surprising body of mixedmedia work.”
Paula Heinonen
Paula Heinonen holds a BA & MA in Human Sciences (Oxon); D.Phil in Social Anthropology (Durham); Dip in Development Studies (Ruskin). She is a Tutor in Social Anthropology for the Human Sciences and Anthropology and Archaeology degrees; tutor in Development Studies for Visiting Students; lecturer, tutor and co-ordinator of Gender Option, Archaeology and Anthropology degree; lecturer and convenor for M.St. in Women’s Studies degree course at the University of Oxford and D.Phil supervisor at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. Paula Heinonen was a senior lecturer in anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology as well as being head of research for the Centre for Research and Training for Women in Development at the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia from 1995 to 2001. She is the author of Youth Gangs and Street Children: Culture, Nurture and Masculinity in Ethiopia (2010) Berghahn Books.
Amal Mohammed Hassan Jamal
Amal Mohammed Hassan Jamal received her doctorate in the Cultural Landscape program of the School of Architecture at McGill University in 2009. She had previously completed a Masters in Urban Planning at McGill in 1999. Dr. Jamal won the Libyan Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research award for postgraduate studies in 1995 and 2002.
Dr. Jamal has worked on landscape and urban designs in Libya and has held teaching and senior academic administrative positions in universities and a municipal planning office. In 2000, she was one of the founders and original teaching staff of the Faculty of Architecture in Africa National University. Since 2000, Dr. Jamal has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning in the Faculty of Engineering at Garyounis University.
Dr. Jamal’s doctoral and recent research records and interprets the material culture of the indigenous Kel Azjer Tuareg of Libya. Her research documents the richness of the Tuareg’s built heritage, and provides material that will encourage Libyan officials and UNESCO to safeguard this heritage from the ravages of a modernizing Libya.
Netta Kornberg
Netta Kornberg is a fourth year University of Toronto student, majoring in African Studies with minors in English and Political Science. She is the president of the newly-created African Studies Course Union (ASCU). Her interests thus far are with the semiotic and discursive construction of Africa, particularly with how characterizations of time are embedded within knowledge of the continent.
Marieme Lo
Marieme S. Lo, a native of Senegal, is currently Assistant Professor in Women and Gender Studies and African Studies at the University of Toronto and convener of the conference “Gender, Material Culture and Cultural Diplomacy.” She earned her MSc and Ph.D. from Cornell University and held a visiting fellowship at the University of Oxford. The scope of her research includes female entrepreneurship, informal economies, transnational trade and diasporic social networks. She grapples with the raison d’être, ethos, and making of gendered entrepreneurial subjects in Africa, accounting for their spatial and translocal re- configurations, situating female entrepreneurship and trade in changing globalizing production and trade contexts. Marieme has been mapping the trajectories of nomadic traders and women entrepreneurs for almost a decade, focusing on the formation of transnational / diasporic markets and networks in metropolitan centers such as New York (Little Senegal) and Paris, and more recently Bangkok, and documenting the social networks, economy of sentiment, sociality and subjectivities that underlie trade practices in translocal sites. Her research pays particular attention to cultural economies, and the production, circulation, marketization and commoditization of iconic objects of cultural identities. She weaves a critical photographic gaze in these inquiries, to render visible actors of “the shadow economy,” as well as reflect on the futures of African cottage industries and indigenous and artisanal production. Marieme is an avid collector of African textiles and trade beads and amateur photographer.
D. Soyini Madison
D. Soyini Madison (PhD 1989) is professor of Performance Studies, with appointments in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Professor Madison lived and worked in Ghana, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar conducting field research on the interconnections between traditional religion, political economy, and indigenous performance tactics. She is the author of numerous publication including 2010 Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance. Cambridge University Press; African Dress Encounters: Fashion, Agency, Power. Co-edited with Karen Tranberg Hansen. University of Chicago Press (in review, projected publication, Fall 2011); 2005 Critical Ethnography: Method, Performance, and Ethics. Sage Publications; 2005 Sage Handbook of Performance Studies. Co-edited with Judith Hamera. Sage Publications; 1994 The Woman That I Am: Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color. St. Martin’s Press.
Georges Djatsa Maffo
Georges Djatsa Maffo earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology, Université de Yaoundé, Cameroon. Lecturer Dept of Anthropology University of Douala. He is in charge of Archives, Bamoun Kingdom, Cameroon.
Keli Maksud
Keli Maksud is a painter who was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya and has been living in Toronto for the last five years. Concerned with cultural hybridity and the construction of identity, Maksud’s mixed media collages interweave cultural signifiers blurring many boundaries.
Maksud graduated from Drawing and Painting at the Ontario College of Art and Design in June 2007. She has participated in a number of group shows including most recently Art 401 at the Gladstone Hotel and 401 Richmond.
Jean Mbaga
B.A. M.A. African History, University of Ibadan, Nigeria. On Ph.D thesis in Anthropology. Researcher, Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Lecturer, Dept of History, University of Douala Cameroon.
Maimuna Mohamud
Maimuna Mohamud is Somali-American graduate. She had recently completed a study examining Somali women’s organizations in the diaspora and the making of diasporic civil society. She holds M.A. in Global Gender Studies and B.A. in Political Science from SUNY University at Buffalo.
Sara G. Nesib
Born in Asmara, Eritrea, Sara G. Nesib is in her last year of undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. She has participated in various student organizations and community building initiatives. She served as the president and treasurer of the African Student Association (2008-1010) as well as the Youth Tenant Representative in her Scarborough neighborhood. Most recently, she was one of four individuals to be selected to join a Youth Caucus at the 42nd Annual Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (CHRA) Congress in Quebec City.
Emmanuel Nuesiri
Emmanuel O. Nuesiri holds a DPhil. from the University of Oxford. His research interests are in global governance, political ecology of natural resources management, gender and poverty. He is presently a research associate with the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit (CPSU), a think-tank for the Commonwealth based at the School of Advanced Studies (SAS) of the University of London. His paper 'The Ubiquitous "Classless" CICAM of Cameroon', written jointly with Orocktanye Besongngem, is part of his research portfolio.
Modupe Olaogun
Modupe Olaogun is an Associate Professor of English and Master of Stong College,
York University. Dr. Modupe Olaogun teaches African and postcolonial literatures. She has published articles and presented papers on different genres of African literature. Her current research focuses on the aesthetics of African drama and on African literature which explores the subject of migration and dispersals from Africa. She provides a venue for public awareness of African theatrical traditions as the artistic director of AfriCan Theatre Ensemble (Toronto), which she founded in 1998.
Oyeronke Oyewumi
Oyeronke Oyewumi is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies. Born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan and the University of California at Berkeley, Oyewumi has been widely recognized for her work. The monograph Invention won the 1998 Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association and was a finalist for the Herskovitts Prize of the African Studies Association in the same year. She has garnered a number of research fellowships, including Rockefeller Fellowships, a Presidential fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. Oyewumi's most recent research support was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship on Human Security (2003/2004), managed by National Council for Research on Women. (NCRW). Her extensive publications include Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gendering Traditions, Spaces, Social Institutions, and Identities (edited). Palgrave McMillan: New York (Forthcoming 2010); African Gender Studies: Conceptual Issues/ Theoretical Questions (edited). Palgrave /Macmillan: New York (2005); African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood,edited. Africa World Press, Trenton: New Jersey (2003); The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: Minnesota (1997) Award winning and numerous articles Conceptualizing Gender: The Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies in JENda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 2002). An Online journal (www.jendajournal.com)
“Family bonds/Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies” Feminism’s at a Millennium" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 25 (1), no. 4 (1) Summer 2000
"DeConfounding Gender: Feminist Theorizing and Western Culture" in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society vol. 23 (1), no. 4 (1) Summer 1998.
"Making History, Creating Gender: Some Methodological and Interpretive Questions in the Writing of Yoruba Oral Traditions" in History in Africa Vol. 25 (1998)For more details, check:
http://www.stonybrook.edu/sociology/?faculty/Oyewumi/oyewumiAto Quayson
Ato Quayson is FGA Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.
Prof Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory. His extensive publications include Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing(Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997; Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) (with David Theo Goldberg); Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minnesota University Press, 2003); Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press, 2007).(with Tejumola Olaniyan); African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Blackwell, 2007), He also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela's, No Easy Walk to Freedom (2002).
For more details see http://www.utoronto.ca/cdts/ato_bio.html
Elisha P. Renne
Elisha P. Renne is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Renne earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University in 1990. Her dissertation focussed on colonial law, marriage practices, and gender relations in southwestern Nigeria. This research formed the basis for her book, Cloth That Does Not Die: The Meaning of Cloth in Bunu Social Life (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), which was a finalist for the 1996 Herskovits Award (African Studies Association). Renne’s most recent and on-going work includes a study of the international polio eradication initiative in Northern Nigeria, focusing on the historical, cultural, political context of this campaign.
Patricia Stamp
Professor Patricia Stamp has recently retired from a long career in the Division of Social Science at York University. She was a founder member of the African Studies, Women’s Studies, International Development Studies and South Asian Studies programs; she also pioneered teaching on global food issues.. Her research interests (with a primary focus on Kenya), have been in African political economy; local government in the Third World; gender relations in the Third World; feminist and discourse theory; gender and politics in Africa; and contemporary discourses of tradition in Africa. Her fieldwork was primarily carried out in Kenya, but she also researched in Ghana, Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia. Her book, Technology, Gender, and Power in Africa was a groundbreaking feminist critique of development aid policies and practice. Her retirement activities include the fostering of craft contracts with Kenyan women, consultancy, lecturing, anthropological photography, and photo art.
Gary van Wyk
Gary van Wyk was born in Zimbabwe, and completed graduate degrees in law, studio arts, and art history in South Africa. He was involved in the anti-apartheid Resistance Art Movement, and was exiled to Zimbabwe in 1986. He completed his Ph.D. in Art History at Columbia University, NY, as a Fulbright Scholar, and received a Rockefeller award for his research in Africa. He is an active curator and scholar of both African art and Contemporary Art by African artists working through Axis Gallery, which he co-founded in Manhattan in 1997. Axis has produced numerous critically acclaimed exhibitions, and worked with leading museums in New York and internationally. Axis’s most recent project was the US solo debut for South African artist Senzeni Marasela, which opened September 25 as part of a downtown Newark art festival. He is currently preparing an exhibition on the art of Tanzania for City University of New York’s QCC Art Gallery.
Angela Washington-Thibodeaux, PhD(ABD), Capella University
Angela Thibodeaux is an All But Dissertation graduate student in Social Work and Community Services at Capella University. She completed her Masters Degree in Humanities with an emphasis on Cultural Anthropology and her Masters of Fine Arts at New College of California, San Francisco. Thibodeaux has a B.A. in American and Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz where she menteed under Activist/Scholar Angela Davis.
Thibodeaux’s interests are particular to Black American and West African Aesthetics, Beautification, and other Black Diasporic Culture and Phenomena. She has guest lectured on the topic of Skin Bleaching and its production both in the U.S. and Ghana. She is the founder of Ambassadors to Africa, a non-profit association which organizes travel study opportunities for students to Ghana and Senegal, West Africa.
CONTACTS
Marieme Lo, PhD: marieme.lo@utoronto.ca or call (416) 946 3218
Netta Kornberg: kornberg.netta@gmail.com
Sarah Nesib: sara.nesib@utoronto.caORGANIZERS
Marieme Lo, New College, African Studies, and Women and Gender Studies Institute Organizing committee: Netta Kornberg, Sarah Nesib, Dr. Dickson Ejoh, Angela Fleury, Dr. Sarah Fee, and Dr. Silvia Forni
All events are free and open to the public - Registration at: gmccd.ut@gmail.com