Douglas A. Anthony
Professional Biography
One of the benefits of teaching an entire continent, from its historical beginnings through the very recent past, is the opportunity to select those themes that are most compelling. I am most drawn to those that bear directly on today's world. Right now those themes include the tricky business of identity formation (In what groups do people claim membership? What historical processes have informed those claims?) and the origins of and remedies for conflict (Do the apparent causes of conflicts actually explain them? What hidden factors do we need to take into account?). These questions surface in one way or another in all of my courses. I am also interested in more traditional concerns like the relationship between political and economic power, and how material conditions and culture interact.
I want students to leave my Africa courses as intelligent participants in discussions about the continent. I also want them to have sharpened their analytical and critical thinking skills in ways that make them more effective participants in the full range of intellectual, professional, and political activities that life offers. I have also had the great fortune to teach a Foundations course on the origin and operation of racial categories in the United States, "America in Black and White." This course draws indirectly on some of my Africa-related interests, but never fails to present thrilling new questions and challenges, for my students and me alike.
My first love, though, is Africa. I took my first African history class on a whim during my last undergraduate semester. By the third class meeting, I was sold. After a year teaching English in Japan, I entered the doctoral program in History at Northwestern University in 1989. As a graduate student I did nearly two years of fieldwork in Nigeria on that country's civil war and role of ethnic and religious differences in both catalyzing and ending the conflict. My more recent research has expanded into other aspects of Nigeria's civil war, and into questions of how Nigerians (and others) from very different backgrounds understand and perform ethnicity, race, modernity, and religious difference.
Education
Ph.D. (History), Northwestern University (1996) Dissertation: "I Need to Get to Kano": Unmaking and Remaking an Igbo Migrant Community in Northern Nigeria, 1966-1986
M.A. (History), Northwestern University (1990)
B.G.S. (General Studies), University of Missouri-Columbia (1988)
Research Interests
As a graduate student I did nearly two years of fieldwork in Nigeria on that country's civil war and role of ethnic and religious differences in both catalyzing and ending the conflict. My more recent research has expanded into other aspects of Nigeria's civil war, and into questions of how Nigerians (and others) from very different backgrounds understand and perform ethnicity, race, and religious difference.
Grants & Awards
Andrew W. Mellon/Central Pennsylvania Consortium Faculty Development Fellowship, 2006-7
Lindback Junior Faculty Award, 2000
Faculty Research Grants, Franklin & Marshall College, 1996-8, 2001-2, 2004
Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Writing Fellowship, 1995-6
Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Dissertation Fellowship, 1992
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Fellowship, 1992
Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Doctoral Fellow, 1989-94
Publications
Monograph
Poison and Medicine: Ethnicity, Power, and Violence in a Nigerian City, 1966-1986. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2002.
Articles
"‘Islam Does Not Belong to Them': Ethnic and Religious Identities Among Male Igbo Converts in Hausaland." Africa (70), 3, 2000.
"'Resourceful and Progressive Blackmen': Modernity and Race in Biafra, 1967-1970" Journal of African History (51), 2010.
Encyclopedia Entry "Nigeria: Federalism, Corruption, and Popular Dissent 1960-1966," in Kevin Shillington, ed. Encyclopedia of African History (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2004).
Reviews
2004 Anthonia Kalu, Broken Lives and Other Stories, in the International Journal of African Historical Studies 37 (1). 2003 Carolyn A. Brown, "We Were All Slaves": African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery, in the International Journal of African Historical Studies 36 (2).
In Progress"Race, Region, and Modernity: Northernization Revisited" (Under review)
"Biafran Independence and the Genocide Argument"
Presentations
2007 "'Claims of Tradition, Demand for Change': Unpacking the Biafran Moment," Invited talk, Cornell University Africana Studies and Research Center
2006 Panel organizer, chair and presenter, "Cosmopolitan Africa: The Example of Kano (Nigeria)" panel. Paper presented: "Reframing Ethnicity and Religion: The ‘Syrian' Presence in Colonial Kano," African Studies Association, San Francisco.
2005 "Echoes of Colonialism, Ghosts of 1966: Nigeria Through the Biafran Lens," African Studies Association, Washington, D.C. Chaired separate panel ("Culturing a Nation: Nigerian Unities and Disunities, Part III)
2005 "The Nexus of Ethnicity, Religion and Violence in Colonial and Post-Colonial Northern Nigeria," Crossing Over: Learning to Navigate the Borderlands of Intercultural Encounters symposium, Cleveland State University.
2004 Chair, "Development, Human Rights and Conflict: Understanding Post-Colonial Challenges Facing African Communities in a Globalized World" panel, CPC Africana Studies Conference ("Globalizations and the African World"), Dickinson College
2003 Discussant, "Sons Abroad: West African Migrants and Community" panel, African Studies Association, Boston.
2003 "Interculturality, Conflict, and Community: Confronting the Legacies of Colonial Rule in Post-colonial Nigeria." University of Illinois Joint Area Studies Centers conference on Interculturality in a Globalizing World.
2003 "Foreign Capital and Socio-Political Instability in Nigeria," World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.
2002 "The Media Doesn't Get it: Chewing Up Nigeria with Soundbites," invited participant, University of Pennsylvania African Studies Center workshop on Africa and the Media.
2002 "Fighting Fire with Rhetoric: Biafran Propaganda and the Nigerian Civil War," African Studies Association, Washington, D.C.
2001 "Legacies of Indirect Rule in Post-Colonial Northern Nigeria," invited participant, Indirect Rule in Africa and South Asia conference, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
2000 "Civilization, War, and Violence in Civil War-Era Nigeria," African Studies Association, Nashville, Tennessee.
1999 Discussant, "Facts and Imaginations: African Women in Stories and Poems" panel, African Studies Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1999 "Disappearing Acts: Ethnicity, Violence, and Dissimulation in Northern Nigeria," invited talk, Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts.
1999 Discussant, "Africa Through the Eye of the Traveler" panel, University of Pennsylvania annual African Studies Workshop, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
1998 Chair and discussant, "The Body as a Battlefield" panel, CPC Women's Studies Conference, Franklin & Marshall College.
1998 "‘One Nigeria': Humility and Reconciliation in Northern Nigeria, 1968-75," African Studies Association, Chicago, Illinois.
1997 "From Vilification to Brotherhood: Official Representations and the Appropriation of Stereotypes of the Igbo in Nigeria, 1966-1970," African Studies Association, Columbus, Ohio.
1995 "Northernization, Unification, and State Creation: The Changing Face of the Igbo Civil Servant in Northern Nigeria," African Studies Association, Orlando, Florida.
1995 "That's Just How They Are: Stereotypes and Historicity in Post-Civil War Nigeria," Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts (Northwestern University)conference, Evanston, Illinois.
1994 "Assimilation and Assertion: Intersections of Muslim, Hausa, and Igbo Identities among Male Converts in Kano, Nigeria," African Studies Association, Toronto, Ontario.
1992 "Problems of Problematizing Ethnicity: The Meaning of 'Igbo' in the Period of the Nigerian Civil War," University of Jos Conference for American Scholars, Jos (Nigeria).
1990 "Igbo Migrants in Northern Nigeria: Aspects of Pre- and Post-Civil War Socio-economic Integration,"
1990 Committee for Institutional Cooperation Fellows Conference, Columbus, Ohio.
