2023: Yolanda Covington-Ward (Umass Amherst), “‘We–stay-here'” and ‘We-left-here’: Black Privilege, Performative Mobilities, and Diaspora Homeland Tensions in Liberia”
2022: Paul Stoller (West Chester University), “Lessons from the Edge of the Village: Extending Wisdom to a Troubled World”
2021: Wale Adebanwi (University of Pennsylvania), “Becoming a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elitism, and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria”
2020: Distinguished Conversation, Laurence Ralph (Princeton University) and Francis Nyamnjoh (University of Capetown), “Systemic Racism in Global Contexts: Legacies and Practices of Racial Violence, Representation, and Neocolonialism”
2019: Dorothy Hodgson (Brandeis University), “Gender Justice, Human Rights and the Problem of ‘Culture.'”
2018: Jemima Pierre (UCLA), “Africa, Anthropology, and the Study of Racial Capitalism: A Tribute to Bernard Magubane on the 25th Anniversary of the Association for Africanist Anthropology”
2017: James Ferguson (Stanford University), “Working the Jobless City: Rethinking Labor and Distribution via Recent Africanist Ethnography”
2016: Anita Spring (University of Florida), “Successes and Barriers to Women’s Entrepreneurship from Micro to Large Scale Enterprises
2015: Jennie Burnet (University of Louisville), “Ethnography in the Age of Total Bureaucratization: Consent, Ethics, and the Familiar/Strange of Government Oversight”
2014: Steven Feld (University of New Mexico), “The Audible Entanglements of Africanist Anthropology and Jazz Studies”
2013: Mwenda Ntarangwi (Calvin College), “Swimming Against the Tide: Hip Hop Youth Culture and Anthropology”
2012: Richard Werbner (University of Manchester), “Divination’s Grasp: Reflexivity, Prosthetics, Perception”
2011: Maria G. Cattell (Field Museum of Natural History), “Gender, Generation and Time in Sub-Saharan Africa”
2010: J. Lorand Matory (Duke University), “Sacred Double Consciousness: The Signs of Citizenship and of Spirit Possession in the Afro-Atlantic World”
2009: Karen Tranberg Hansen (Northwestern University), “Chiluba’s Trunks: Consumption, Excess, and the Dramaturgy of Power in Zambia”
2008: Bennetta Jules-Rosette (University of Califronia, San Diego), “Innovation and Agency: Structures for Change in Africa and the African Diaspora”
2007: Gwendolyn Mikell (Georgetown University), “Remembering Elliott P. Skinner: Looking Back and Moving Forward”
2006: Bogumil Jewsiewicki (Université Laval), “Postscriptural Communication, Postphotographic Images, Performance as Heritage Preservation in Africa”
2005: Gracia Clark (Indiana University), “Accountability and Authority in African Ethnography”
2004: Mahir Saul (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), “Islam and West African Anthropology”
2003: Betty Harris (Oklahoma University), “South Africa, Globalization, and Reconciliation: Renegotiating the Past, Building the Future”
2002: Carolyn Martin Shaw (University of California at Santa Cruz), “Structures, Processes, Discourses, and Action: Changing Anthropology in Africa”
2001: Parker Shipton (Boston University), “Blood, Soil, and Sovereignty in Tropical Africa”
2000: John Ogbu (University of California at Berkeley), “Ways of Knowing”
1999: Sally Falk Moore (Harvard University), “Skeptical Encounters with Development Discourse”
1998: John Middleton (Yale University), “Studying Merchants”
