The Class of 1957, Chair; Director, Center for African Studies, Professor of Music Department
Center for African Studies
James Q Davies is The Class of 1957 Chair, the Faculty Director at the Center for African Studies, and Professor of Music. He is editor of the UChicago Press book series New Material Histories of Music, and scholar with musicological interests and expertise in the long nineteenth century. He authored the books Romantic Anatomies of Performance (California: 2014) and Creatures of the Air: Music, Atlantic Spirits, Breath, 1817-1913 (Chicago: 2023). James grew up in Johannesburg, with first degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand. He wrote...
Professor Hall's research is focused on the intellectual and social history of a region of West Africa called the Sahel, which straddles the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. It encompasses the modern countries of Mauritania, Mali and Niger. Most of the research that he has carried out has been based in and around the northern Malian town of Timbuktu, in a sub-region of the Sahel called the Niger Bend. He has worked in Timbuktu because it is the site of remarkable collections of written sources in Arabic from across the Sahel and further a field in the Muslim world. His work is located...
Dr. Duncan Omanga is an educationist, program manager, and academic with a deep commitment to the study of Africa. He currently serves as Associate Director at the Center for African Studies (CAS) and Manager of the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
Prior to joining CAS, Dr. Omanga was a Program Officer in the Africa Section of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington, D.C. He previously served as...
