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 Eskimo village 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 in Upstate New York before coming to Michigan State. His main research focuses on how ordinary people grappled with the idea of independence in mid-20th century Africa, and how they came to terms with their changing relations to the state during the decolonization process. As a social historian, his classes tend to focus on big ideas like nationalism, slavery, sport/leisure, development, etc. and then examine how ordinary people interacted with these ideas, were changed by the ideas, and how they were able to change them in subtle ways.

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.