The Michigan State University African Studies Center has close to a hundred Core Faculty with experience on Africa, probably one of the largest in the nation. The Center features many scholars in social science, agricultural economics, African languages, the arts and humanities, education, health and medicine and many other fields.
The faculty members are listed alphabetically by college and departmental affiliation, noting geographical areas of Africa experience, and teaching and research interests.
If you are interested in becoming a part of the African Studies Center's Core Faculty, please fill out the Membership Request form.
Stephen Esquith
Department: Residential College Arts and Human Dean
Countries/Research: Mali
Email:
Biography: Stephen L. Esquith has been working on ethical problems in developing countries since 1990, when he was a senior Fulbright scholar in Poland. His primary scholarly work is Intimacy and Spectacle (Cornell, 1994), a critique of classical and modern liberal political philosophy. Steve has also been involved in numerous civic engagement projects in the public schools, including an exchange program between local elementary school children in the United States and schoolchildren in a community school in Kati, Mali. He led study abroad programs focusing on ethical issues in development in Mali in 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010 and spent the 2005-06 academic year teaching and working with colleagues at the University of Bamako as a senior Fulbright scholar. After consulting with the Malian Ministry for Reconciliation in 2013, he returned to Mali in summer 2014 to lead a new study abroad program there to develop a local dialogue forum in collaboration with students and faculty from the Ecole Normal Superieure in Bamako and the Institute for Popular Education in Kati.
Emine Evered
Department: History
Email:
Biography: As a historian of the Middle East and North Africa, Emine Evered specializes in analyzing late Ottoman and early nationalist accounts of education and public health as a means to understanding themes in modernization, nation-building, and ethno-religious particularization. As an historian of the Middle East and North Africa, Emine Ö. Evered specializes in analyzing late Ottoman and early nationalist accounts of education and public health as a means to understanding themes in modernization, nation-building, and ethno-religious particularization. She earned her PhD in History with a minor in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona. She also holds an MA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduate and undergraduate degrees from institutions in Turkey.
Amara Ezeamama
Department: Psychiatry
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Itziar Familiar-Lopez
Department: Department of Psychiatry
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Masako Fujita
Department: Anthropology Social Science
Countries/Research: Kenya
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Biography: Masako Fujita is a biological anthropologist specializing in contemporary human variation in micronutrient storage and metabolism. Masako's research focuses on the health and evolutionary implications of mother and offspring nutrition. Masako's research is a combination of epidemiological, biomarker and ethnographic methods to investigate biocultural pathways to malnutrition, particularly clarifying why some nutritional deficiencies and health issues persist today despite public health intervention efforts. Masako's work also evaluates the applicability of clinical nutrition and health research methods to anthropological studies in resource-poor, non-clinical settings.
Stephen P. Gasteyer
Department: Sociology
Countries/Research: Mali
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Biography: Dr. Stephen P. Gasteyer is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University. Dr. Gasteyer’s research focuses on the nexus between water, land, community development. Specifically, his research currently addresses: 1) community capacity development and civic engagement through leadership training; 2) the political and social processes that enable or hinder community access to water and land resources, specifically (but not exclusively) in rural communities; 3) the class and race effects of access to basic services (water, sanitation, food, health care); 4) community capacity, community resilience and water systems management; 5) the impacts of greening in economically depressed small cities; 6) the community aspects of bioenergy development; 7) international social movements and community rights to basic services; and 8) facilitating cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary partnerships to address water and land resources management.
Jacqueline Gerson
Department: Earth And Environmental Sciences
Countries/Research: Senegal; Kenya; Ghana
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Peter Glendinning
Department: Department of Art, Art History, & Design
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Rob Glew
Department: CASID (Director)
Countries/Research: Burkina Faso; China; Ghana; Malawi; Mali; Niger; Nigeria; Tanzania; Senegal and South Africa
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Biography: Robert Glew is the director of the Center for Advanced Study of International Development and associate professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Glew has 25 years of experience working in African societies on issues of international development in the areas of coping and livelihood strategies, health, political and social change, education, and identity politics. He has taught courses on international development, cultural change, and socio-cultural diversity.
Michael D. Gottfried
Department: MSU Museum
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Biography: Michael Gottfried has been at MSU since 1997, and is currently an Associate Professor of Geological Sciences and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the MSU Museum. Mike has also served as Director of MSU's Center for Integrative Studies in General Science since 2006. His research focuses on marine fish evolution in high-latitude southern hemisphere settings, the paleobiology of the giant fossil 'megatoothed' sharks, and the evolution and biogeographical relationships of vertebrate faunas from the ancient southern supercontinent of Gondwana. Mike has conducted field expeditions in Madagascar, Tanzania, South Africa, and New Zealand, and at many sites in the USA, in connection with his research. His work on the evolution of giant fossil sharks has led to involvement in several documentary films, including segments on the Discovery Channel's 'Shark Week' programming, and most recently as part of the 'Prehistoric Predators' series on National Geographic Television.
Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS)
Eye on Africa
African Tea Time
