Project Director

Elizabeth MacGonagle, Director of the Kansas African Studies Center and Associate Professor of History and African & African-American Studies, is the Project Director. As a historian of Africa and the Diaspora, her research links nation, culture, and ethnicity to processes of identity formation. She has expertise in issues of history and memory related to the heritage of slavery. As KASC Director for the past two years, she has experience with the administration of a major Title VI NRC and FLAS grant from the Department of Education. She has brought humanities scholars and other experts together for successful public programming on topics such as the recent Ebola outbreak, an Africa world documentary film festival, a literary celebration of the work of Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, and remembrances of Chinua Achebe and Nelson Mandela.

Project Co-Director

Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Professor of English and Environmental Studies, is the Co-Director of the project. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of African literature and environmentalism. He is the author of Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology and the coeditor of Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa. He is serving as the Interim Director of KASC during the 2015-2016 academic year and will lead programming for the project through the summer of 2016.

Assistant Director, Kansas African Studies Center

Emily Riley has received her PhD in Cultural Anthropology with a focus on political anthropology and gender in Senegal and West Africa from Michigan State University. Her current work focuses on the campaigns of several female parliamentarians in the Senegalese government and the praise singers that animate rallies and serve to remind spectators of the politicians’ magnanimous stature. Her research and teaching interests include women and politics, identity politics, social media and social change, national identity formations, and hospitality exchange.

Assistant Professor of African & African-American Studies

Peter Ojiambo, Assistant Professor in African & African-American Studies, will oversee the project’s development of educational resources about Somali language and culture. Ojiambo, who has been teaching KiSwahili since 1996, created an open-source textbook for elementary KiSwahili as well as other teaching materials. As Language Coordinator in his department, he regularly supervises lecturers in African languages and guides their creation of teaching materials. He works closely with KASC staff as the Center’s Faculty Associate Director.

Associate Professor of Theatre

Nicole Hodges Persley, Associate Professor of Theatre, has worked with diverse African communities for over 15 years. She has lived and worked in West Africa and has several employment experiences engaging immigrant youth. She was a cultural arts director for the African Refugee Resource Center in Los Angeles, working with Eritrean, Somali and Ethiopian youth to use film to narrate their experiences as Africans in America. She created a short documentary film, Don’t Want to Live Like a Refugee (1999) that narrated the experiences of East African youth living in LA. She also used improvisatory practices of art making with self-taught artists in Dakar, Senegal. She is the author of a forthcoming book, Sampling and Remixing Blackness, on non-African American artists in theater, conceptual art, and dance who utilize African American expressions of Hip-hop to articulate their personal narratives. She is the director of ITT- The Interactive Theater Troupe at the University of Kansas which uses improvisatory theater and performance to teach students, faculty and staff about diversity on KU’s campus.

Associate Professor of Visual Art

Tanya Hartman teaches painting and drawing as an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art. Her work is about family upheaval, memory, and its translation into words. Hartman attempts to bridge the gap between what is perceived as a book and what is perceived as a piece of visual art. She fuses prose that is narrative with images that are visual to create an entity that is simultaneously a story and an image yet not purely either of the two. She brings the expansive possibilities inherent in oil painting together with less traditional techniques such as stenciling, stitching and stippling to create her own artistic sense of place.

Marwa Ghazali completed her master’s thesis in anthropology at the University of Kansas on the Bantu Somali community in Kansas City. Her work explored spaces of suffering and trauma among refugees. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Anthropology Department at KU researching subcultures in Egypt. She will draw on her Arabic language skills to facilitate contacts among African immigrants for the project.

Executive Director, Kansas Humanities Council

Julie Mulvihill has been the Executive Director of the Kansas Humanities Council since 2007, and has served as the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Federation of State Humanities Councils since 2011. Under Mulvihill’s leadership, the public humanities are flourishing in Kansas. In 2014, KHC supported 804 humanities events in 114 Kansas communities. These included projects supported by grants, book discussions, speakers in history, poetry presentations, readers theater events, and others. To reach these impressive numbers, KHC partnered with 204 organizations and reached nearly half a million Kansans. Mulvihill is known for her expert focus on the power of stories in her leadership of KHC.