Biography: Dr. Isaac Kalumbu serves as the program manager for The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at Michigan State University (MSU). As program manager, Dr. Kalumbu is responsible for the development, implementation, and management of the program at MSU. In 1997, Dr. Kalumbu joined MSU’s College of Music where he taught courses on African American, Caribbean, and African popular music. He has also led several study abroad programs to Jamaica and South Africa. Dr. Kalumbu joined the university’s International Studies and Programs in 2009, first as the assistant to the director of the African Studies Center and then as the program manager for The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at MSU. Dr. Kalumbu was born and raised in Zimbabwe and completed a bachelor of arts in economic history and history, with a minor in philosophy, from the University of Zimbabwe. He went on to earn his doctorate in ethnomusicology, with a minor in African American studies, from Indiana University in 1999.

Biography: Dr. John B. Kaneene's research emphasis includes the epidemiology and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance; surface water contamination; bovine tuberculosis; and disease surveillance. A focus is on the epidemiology of food-borne pathogens and their relationships to the development of antimicrobial drug resistance in animal and human populations, particularly Campylobacter, Salmonella, and E. coli. He is also actively involved in epidemiological studies and risk assessments of bovine tuberculosis in wildlife, livestock, and pets. As director and founder of the Populations Medicine Center, Kaneene addresses issues involving epidemiology, preventative medicine, and public health on a variety of diseases.

Biography: Candace Keller earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of the History of Art at Indiana University, where she majored in African art and minored in African Studies and African American art. Her work is driven by a commitment to intellectual and cultural diversity. She strives to bring African cultural practices and theoretical perspectives to the conceptual awareness of global audiences, emphasizing their critical value within our increasingly interconnected, transcultural world. With a specific focus on vernacular art and photography, her work centers on the power of representation. She investigates the ways in which cultural knowledge and markers of social identity are constructed, perpetuated, and contested via visual language systems. In this vein, she considers how individuals—artists, patrons, and audiences—ascribe meaning to images as they traverse cultural contexts, cultivating a sense of social belonging, individuality, or exclusivity, to appreciate how local means of visual expression can have far reaching significance for global citizens. Her research and courses center on issues of identity, personhood, and complex agency, as well as processes of transculturation, globalization, nationalism, and postcolonialism. Since 2008, Dr. Keller has held a joint appointment as Assistant Professor of African art in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design and the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University. She is core faculty in the African Studies Center, Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities, and African and African American Studies. Her research on the histories of photography in Mali, West Africa, has appeared in several publications, invited lectures, and conference presentations and has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the British Library, Fulbright-Hays, Indiana University, and Michigan State University.

Biography: Dr. Leichtman is Associate Professor of Anthropology, and she focuses on relations between the Middle East and (East and West) Africa. Her research highlights the interconnections among religion, migration, politics, and economic development through examining Muslim institutions and the communities they serve. She earned her Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from Brown University, and she also holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in International Relations and African Studies and a B.A. in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan. She is author of Shi‘i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal and co-editor of New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, Power, and Femininity. Among many other publications, Dr. Leichtman also co-edited two special journal issues: The Shiʿa of Lebanon: New Approaches to Modern History, Contemporary Politics, and Religion in Die Welt des Islams and Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Movement, Identity, and Contemporary Reconfigurations in City and Society. As a Fulbright Scholar at American University of Kuwait, she launched a second project on Gulf Islamic humanitarianism directed to global economic development, in particular in Africa. Dr. Leichtman was also a Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) Fellow, a Luce/ACLS Fellow in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs, an Institute of Advanced Study Fellow at Durham University, UK, and an Aarhus University Research Foundation Visiting Fellow in Denmark. She teaches courses on Islam in Africa, Anthropology of the Middle East, Anthropology of Religion, and Ethnographic Field Methods."