President
Term: 2024-26
Wale Adebanwi, a Guggenheim fellow, is an anthropologist and political scientist. He is a Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Before moving to Penn, he was the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations and the Director of the African Studies Center at Oxford University, United Kingdom. His research, focusing on Nigeria and South Africa, broadly examines the process of the social mobilization of power and interest in Africa. He is the author of four monographs, including Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo and Corporate Agency (Cambridge, 2014) and How to Become a Big Man in Africa: Subalternity, Elites, and Ethnic Politics in Contemporary Nigeria (Indiana, 2024), and (co)editor of several volumes. He is currently completing a manuscript on racialization and the politics of street renaming in post-apartheid South Africa.

Secretary
Term: 2024-2027

K.D. Thompson is Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities, Director of the Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition, and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with additional affiliations in African Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Gender & Women’s Studies, and Language Sciences. Their research uses critical ethnography and critical discourse analysis to examine African and Muslim discourse, with specific projects in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, North America, and online.

Treasurer
Term: 2024-27

Board Member-at-Large
Term: 2024-25

Jennie E. Burnet is an associate professor of anthropology and director of the Institute for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, United States of America. She is the award-winning author of Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda. Her forthcoming book, To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue during the Rwandan Genocide, examines how and why some Rwandans risked their lives to save Tutsi from the carnage. Her research has appeared in Politics & Gender, African Affairs, African Studies Review, and Women’s Studies International Forum.

Program Chair

Omolade Adunbi is a political and environmental anthropologist and Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies, Professor of Law (courtesy) and the Director of the African Studies Center. He is a Faculty Associate, Program in the Environment (Pite), the Donia Human Rights Center (DHRC) and the Energy Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His areas of research explore issues related to governance, infrastructures of extraction, environmental politics and rights, power, violence, culture, transnational institutions, multinational corporations and the postcolonial state. In 2016, he received The Class of 1923 Teaching Award at the University of Michigan. His book, Oil Wealth and Insurgency in Nigeria (Indiana University Press, 2015) won the 2017 The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland’s Amaury Talbot Book Award for the best book in Anthropology of Africa. His latest book, Enclaves of Exception: Special Economic Zones and Extractive Practices in Nigeria, (Indiana University Press, 2022) interrogates the idea of Free Trade Zones and its interrelatedness to oil refining practices, infrastructure and China’s engagement with Africa. His new project is at the intersection of social media, climate change and the politics of the environment

Program Chair

Vivian Chenxue Lu is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and faculty affiliate in African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Her work examines the growing migratory and commercial linkages between West Africa, specifically Nigeria, and the Global South.

Program Chair
Temporarily appointed, pending confirmation by vote

Committee Chairs

Student Paper Awards Committee co-Chair

Bennetta Jules-Rosette is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and the Director of the African and African-American Studies Research Center at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of nine books and over 120 scholarly articles on African, African-American, and diaspora studies. Her areas of interest include ethnographic and semiotic studies of art, religion, and technology. Her books include African Apostles: Ritual and Conversion in the Church of John Maranke (1975), A Paradigm for Looking: Cross-Cultural Research with Visual Media (1977, co-authored with Beryl L. Bellman), The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System (1984), Terminal Signs: Computers and Social Change in Africa (1990), Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (1998), Josephine Bake