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News and Noteworthy Achievements

By Khalid El-Hassan and Kiran Jayaram

1. Faculty/Staff Research Activities and Accomplishments

  • Elizabeth MacGonagle, History/African & African-American Studies, presented "'Ngungunyana was a Problem': Memory, Identity and a Legacy of Overrule in Southeast Africa" at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, LASO Panel on "Memory & Identity in Lusophone Africa," Washington, D.C. in December 2002.

  • Elizabeth Asiedu, Economics, presented a paper at a conference, "High-Level Seminar on The New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD)," in Senegal, West Africa, December 9-11, 2002, organized by the IMF for African Heads of States and Finance Ministers. Paper: "Policy Reform and Foreign Direct Investment to Africa: Absolute Progress but Relative Decline".

  • Elizabeth Asiedu, Economics, has been selected by the Emily Taylor Women's Resource Center to receive the KU 2003 Outstanding Woman Educator Award.

  • Khalid El-Hassan, Ken Lohrentz, Garth Myers, John Janzen, Omofolabo Ajayi, and Jemaine Abidogun (SW Missouri State), as part of a working group on African migration, held a roundtable at the December 2002 African Studies Association meeting in Washington D.C. on recent African migration to Kansas and the Midwest. Earlier in the fall, 2002, a similar panel was presented to the 8th Annual Meeting of the Mid America Alliance for African Studies (MAAAS) at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma.

2. African Studies Faculty and Staff Abroad

  • Beverly Mack, Assoc. Prof. AAAS, has spent several months' of fall '02 and spring '03 in Morocco on a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship continuing her research on pre-20th century Islamic women writers, and evidence for the Nigeria-Morocco connection.

  • Margaret Rausch, Asst. Professor of Religious Studies, is spending the 2002-3 academic year on a American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in Morocco researching Berber women's religious movements.

  • Garth Myers, Associate Professor of Geography, spent most of December '02 and January '03 in Zambia on a Fulbright Fellowship, as well as overseeing the three-year State Department Public Inter-University Linkage Program between the University of Kansas and the University of Zambia.

  • Elizabeth MacGonagle, History/AAAS traveled to Ghana and Togo over winter break to conduct fieldwork on the changing use of West African slave forts. With support from the African Studies Resource Center at KU, Prof. MacGonagle visited ten former slave forts in December 2002 and January 2003.

3. Visiting International Scholars

Seven Zambian scholars in geography and geology from the University of Zambia, Lusaka, were at the University of Kansas during the academic year 2002-3, benefiting from the State Department Universities Affiliation program jointly directed by Associate Professor Garth Myers and Dr. Imasiku Nyambe, of the UNZA School of Mines. In spring 2003, Dr. Imasiku Nyambe of the UNZA School of Mines, and coordinator of the program with Garth Myers, returned for a brief collaborative research visit. Iweka Masialeti and Simon Nkemba were in Lawrence for the full spring 2003 semester, taking classes and working on research.