Dr. Samuel Abaidoo
Sociology

Dr. Sam Abaidoo enjoys observing the variety of social laboratory situations all around us, and within which various social actors subconsciously perform. It is interesting to observe people stepping into and out of roles in focused and unfocused interactions with people around them. Having served as junior scholar for Multiculturalism Canada some few years ago he has also been fascinated by the policy discussions and socio-political discourse about ethnic, racial and cultural diversity on the opposite sides of the North American 49th parallel. His teaching and research areas include technology and their societal implications/impacts, with particular interest in the emerging field of biotechnology, sociology of the family and social change in West Africa. Regarding the latter his current research focuses on changing perceptions and attitudes toward filial or familial obligations. He also serves as chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice.

Dr. Akanmu Adebayo
African, African Diaspora Studies

Dr. Akanmu Adebayo has traveled through or visited ten of the sixteen West African countries that make up the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Currently, his position as executive director of the Institute for Global Initiatives has meant less teaching and more administrative work than usual. Whenever he gets the chance to teach, he loves to offer courses in African history, African Diaspora history, and World history. He has continued his research in three major areas: money, especially currency devaluation, in West Africa; globalization, particularly its impact on developing nations; and pastoralism in West Africa. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Global Initiatives.

Dr. Francine Allen
Literature

Dr. Francine Allen graduated from high school with a certificate for perfect attendance. From first grade to high school, she never missed a day of class. Her research interests derive from her doctoral work, which is on the Christian spirituality of James Baldwin. While she is still working on issues connected to Baldwin, she has begun research on the ways in which African and African-American literary artists parallel one another in their fictional depiction of racial and gender oppression. Over the summer she hopes to work on an article or series of articles that discuss the ways in which Christian philosophical thinking has influenced African and African-American writers, particularly considering the religious justification for slavery and colonialism. Since spring semester, she has been teaching world literature, African literature, and literature of the African Diaspora.

Dr. William Allen
African History

Dr. William Allen is a great example of the two trajectories that constitute the African Diaspora: displacement from Africa to the Americas as a result of transatlantic slavery and return to Africa after emancipation: his paternal great grandparents were former slaves who returned to Liberia in the 1890s. His research interest is the formation of identities in the Atlantic World. He is presently researching strategies of survival adopted by freed Africans who reversed sail and returned to Africa: Sierra Leoneans, Liberians, and Afro-Brazilians. His teaching interest is the convergence of cultures in the Atlantic World. Accordingly, he proposed a new course for Fall 2007 called “the History of Atlantic Civilization,” which has been approved as a Year of the Atlantic World course.

Dr. Jesse Benjamin
Sociology

Dr. Jesse Benjamin has lived in Toronto, Brooklyn, Minnesota, Israel/Palestine, Kenya, London, among other places. This has fostered an interest in the variable manifestations of global patterns of race, racism, inequality, and their social inter-connectedness. His current research focuses on issues of history, identity and Pan-African epistemology in East Africa; the histories of colonialism and decolonization; and in North America, patterns of whiteness and white identity formation in the larger matrix of racial social constructions. He is currently investigating problems of racial and other social divisions throughout Africa, looking for broader theoretical patterns. In the Middle East, his work looks at Bedouin and Kurdish communities, and also at the African Diaspora in Asia. He teaches a variety of courses, including SOCI 3314 "Race and Ethnicity," SOCI 4434 "Emerging Social Issues in Africa," and other Sociology courses which are also listed as AADS and/or AMST courses.

Dr. Dan Paracka
International Education

Dr. Dan Paracka served in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone from 1985 to 1987, where he learned to walk and to talk again. Dan lived in the chiefdom headquarters of Wara Wara Bafodia, a farming community of about 200 homes with no electricity. He also learned to tap palm wine. Dan speaks Krio, small small. His research interests include internationalizing the curriculum through research partnerships with African universities, service learning and study abroad, and history of higher education in Africa. He is currently writing on global learning and organizing the Year of the Atlantic World. His areas of teaching interests include West African and pan-African intellectual history. In Fall 2007 he will be teaching KSU 1101: Converging Currents and Cultures of the Atlantic World.

Dr. Ryan Ronneberg
History

Dr. Ryan Ronnenberg is newly married, new to Georgia, and new to the faculty of KSU’s History and Philosophy Department. His research interests include literacy, East African popular culture, and African Intellectual History. He is currently writing a history of Tanzanian laughter. Dr. Ronnenberg is interested in the development of critical historical thinking in the classroom, whether in African or World History, and is committed pedagogically to the open critique of narrative history. Thematically, he is invested in the historical contextualization of contemporary images of violence, in providing students the means to understand, through a world historical lens, widely used terms like genocide, counterinsurgency, and corruption.

Dr. Robert Simon
Spanish and Portuguese Languages, Literatures & Cultures

Dr. Robert Simon writes poetry in which he combines English, Spanish and Portuguese. Also, he loves to play the saxophone and to sing. His research interests are literature and cultural evolution in Spain and Portugal, which covers the colonial and post-colonial periods in both countries and their ex-colonies. This includes much of Africa (both Arabic-speaking and Sub-Saharan) in each case. Currently, he is applying a post-colonial reading to the evolution of Fado in Portugal and attempting to create a framework by which we may apply Kuhn's theory of the Paradigm Shift to Spanish and Portuguese Peninsular literatures. Also, he is studying how the image of "America" has influenced Iberian Cultures. He teaches Spanish and (in the future) Portuguese language, literatures and cultures, including Iberian, Latin American, Luso-Brazilian and Luso-African literatures and cultures.

Dr. Garrett Smith
Geography

Dr. Garrett Smith served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo 1986-89, working with farmers’ cooperatives, and as a Peace Corps Trainer in Mali in 1990 assisting with small enterprise development. He liked West Africa so much he did his dissertation research in Burkina Faso in 1992 on the topic, “wild edible plants.” His research interests are in cultural geography, geography of religion, and human use of forests. More recently, he has been involved in campus administration as Chair of the Department of Geography and Anthropology. His teaching interests are in World Regional Geography, Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa, and Cultural Geography.

Dr. Eva Thompson
African American and African Diaspora Literatures

Dr. Eva M. Thompson likes to think of herself as having a green thumb (even though no live plants adorn her office) and gets very excited every spring when her gardenia shrubs are in bloom.  Influenced by such African American women writers as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, both of whom argue implicitly and explicitly that the work of the writer is to save lives, which is what Walker did with Zora Neale Hurston and Morrison with Margaret Garner, Dr. Thompson’s research interests focus on black men and women born into slavery in the Americas, whose lives were rendered historically unexceptional.  And, thus, one interest is the intellectual history of enslaved persons in the Americas.  Another is what Morrison refers to as “the site of memory,” which is to say geographical spaces for remembering New World slavery, and she has traveled throughout the Americas in search of these sites.  Presently, she is working on a creative non-fiction project, which takes as its subject Mary Prince, an ordinary woman born into slavery in a British slaveholding colony, who did a most remarkable thing: She released herself from enslavement in London simply by walking away and then dedicated her lived experience to the British Anti-Slavery Society. Dr. Thompson teaches a variety of courses in the English, African and African Diaspora Studies and American Studies programs, for example, American Literature, Major African American Writers, and 20th Century Caribbean Women Writers.  Moreover, with a background in Black Studies, a multi-disciplinary program, she piloted a course on the Modern Civil Rights Movement in Spring 2007 and is planning a course on African Americans and the cinema.