Biography: Nwando Achebe is an award-winning author and professor of history at Michigan State University. She is the founding editor-in-chief of the new Journal of West African History (maiden issue, spring 2015), to be published by Michigan State University Press; and Co-Convenor of the African Studies Association Women's Caucus. Nwando Achebe's research interests involve the use of oral history in the study of women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria.

Biography: John Aerni-Flessner earned a BA in History from Grinnell College in Iowa. He taught high school in rural Lesotho (a country in southern Africa) and in the Yup'ik community of Kwethluk, Alaska before returning to graduate school. He earned a PhD in African and World History from Washington University in St. Louis and taught at SUNY Cortland prior to his arrival at Michigan State. His historical research focuses on the history of borders, development, independence and on relations between South Africa and Lesotho. He teaches a wide range of classes tend to focus on like nationalism, enslavement, leisure and popular culture, and the history of development. He has published two books: Dreams for Lesotho: Independence, Foreign Assistance, and Development with the University of Notre Dame Press and White Gold and Thirsty Communities: The Cold War, Apartheid, and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project with the Africa Institute of South Africa. He co-edited Migrant, Borders, and Borderlands with three South African and Zimbabwean collaborators, and was the co-author of The Historical Dictionary of Lesotho, 3rd Edition with Charles Fogelman and Nthabiseng Mokoena-Mokhali.

Biography: Laura Apol is an associate professor of teacher education. Her research interests include literary theory and children's and adolescent literature, issues of diversity in children's and adolescent literature, critical reading and response to literature, and historical children's literature. Recent projects include using writing to facilitate healing among high school- aged orphans in post-genocide Rwanda, and publishing stories of Rwandan Tutsi genocide for children of Rwanda and of the world. She has co-edited a collection of poetry for children and, as a published writer and poet, she conducts creative writing workshops and classes for teachers and students on all levels.

Biography: Safoi Babana-Hampton is Associate Professor of French in the department of Romance and Classical Studies at Michigan State University. Her primary areas of teaching and research are 20th and 21st century French and Francophone literatures and film. Her book Reflexions littraires sur lespace public marocain dans loeuvre d'Abdellatif Labi (Summa Publications, 2008) critically examines of the role of culture in the construction of civic consciousness and the formation of a modern public space in Morocco. Her current research project is a comparative study of images of multicultural and transnational citizenship in literary and filmic productions from the Maghreb and the Maghrebi diaspora in France.