Sub-Saharan Africa

Abimbola Fapohunda

In the words of Dr. Fapohunda:

As a trained epidemiologist and health educator, Dr. Fapohunda's research focuses on health eating and physical activity among immigrants. I was the Principal Investigator (PI) on an immigrant study that examines Arab Americans’ Perceptions of Healthy Eating and Physical Activity, the Co-PI on the study that investigates African Immigrants’ Perceptions and Practices around Healthy Eating and Physical Activity through photovoice; and utilizing my graduate training in public health, nutrition, and food hygiene, I conducted health and nutrition workshops for a diverse group of community-based organizations in Greater Pittsburgh.

I collaborated with the Redeem Christian Church of God in Pittsburgh, PA and the African Cultural and Resource Center in Silver Springs, MD on developing a research plan for creating a culturally-tailored Food Frequency Questionnaire among African Immigrants residents in Allegheny County, PA and Montgomery County, MD, using a Community-based Participatory Research approach. I also the Co-PI on the study that seeks to explore and understand the beliefs, perceptions and practices of young adult offspring of African immigrants regarding what healthy eating and health activity is in the context of their environment and culture. I was the PI for the African Immigrant study that examined the preventive health care practices, knowledge and attitudes of West African immigrants in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. 

I have spent the past fourteen years as an independent consultant, conducting needs assessments and program evaluation on the effectiveness of numerous community-based initiatives related to health disparities in both behavioral and physical health, including nutrition, smoking cessation, HIV/AIDS and oral health. I am also a part-time instructor in the Department of Africana Studies, University of Pittsburgh. For the second year this summer, I was the assistant faculty coordinator for the University of Pittsburgh Study Abroad - Tanzania Program, where I taught Public Health Issues in Tanzania.

Howard French

Howard W. French received his B.A. from the University of Massachusetts – Amherst. He worked as a French-English translator in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in the early 1980s, and taught English literature at the University of Ivory Coast. His career in journalism began as a freelance reporter for The Washington Post and many other publications in West Africa. He was hired by The New York Times in 1986, and worked as a metropolitan reporter for three years, and from 1990 to 2008 reported for The Times as bureau chief for Central America and the Caribbean, West Africa, Japan and the Koreas, and China in Shanghai. During this time, his work was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; he was twice the recipient of an Overseas Press Club Award, and he has also won the Grantham Environmental Award, among other awards. He was also named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Maryland. From 2005 to 2008 alongside his work for The Times, Mr. French was a weekly columnist on global affairs for the International Herald Tribune.

He is the author of "A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa" (2004), which was named non-fiction book of the year by several newspapers, and won the 2005 American Library Association Black Caucus Award for Non-Fiction, and was runner up for the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage and for the Hurston Wright Foundation's non-fiction prize. Other awards include an honorary doctorate from the University of Maryland.  He is also the author of “China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants are Building a New Empire in Africa, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in May 2014.

His work has been published in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Transition, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Crisis. He is also a documentary photographer, whose book, "Disappearing Shanghai: Images and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life," with Qiu Xiaolong, was published in 2012.

French was a 2011 fellow of the Open Society Foundations and is presently researching a book about the geopolitics of East Asia.

Holly Hickling

Holly Hickling joined the UHC team in January 2014 as the new Academic Community Engagement Advisor. She helps students connect their academic interests to meaningful community engagement opportunities, including internships, long term volunteer opportunities, and community based research. 

Holly brings both a breadth and depth of experience in community engagement and research to the Honors College. After receiving her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with a minor in Music from Chatham College (now Chatham University) in 2004, she interned with a publishing company in Paris before a three-year stint with FORGE in Zambia, where she coordinated community service programs in refugee camps, including training and leading students from Pitt and UCLA to be Project Facilitators in the camps. The students facilitated programs including literacy, health, sports, and music. After FORGE, Holly continued working in Zambia with Poverty Action Lab, administering research studies on topics including malaria, reproductive health, and girls' education. Returning to the States, she worked at Northern Illinois University for a year and a half before returning to her home in Pittsburgh, PA where she spent a year doing small consulting projects and having adventures with her preschool-aged daughter.

Throughout her academic and professional career, Holly has maintained a love of music. She has played trombone in Robert Morris University's Jam Blues Band and flute in the May Day marching band (Pittsburgh's local radical street marching band). She played guitar in an Irish band in Zambia called The Old Hags and served two summers as "Harmonious Holly" at Camp Deer Creek in Cheswick, PA

Dennis Jett

Professor Dennis Jett is a former American ambassador who joined the Penn State University School of International Affairs after a career in the U.S. Foreign Service that spanned twenty-eight years and three continents. His experience and expertise focus on international relations, foreign aid administration, and American foreign policy. Immediately prior to joining Penn State, he was dean of the International Center at the University of Florida for eight years.

Professor Jett's career abroad began in 1973, when he was a political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He later spent several years in Africa, first as the deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Malawi, where he assisted in the response to an influx of more than 500,000 Mozambican refugees, and then as deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Liberia, where he was the second ranking officer during the Liberian Civil War. For his service in Liberia during this tumultuous time, he received the State Department's Distinguished Honor Award for “exceptional service, superb leadership, keen perception and adroitness in the formulation and execution of U.S. foreign policy.”

Professor Jett then became special assistant to the president and senior director for African Affairs at the National Security Council, where he was responsible for Africa policy during the first six months of the Clinton Administration. He went on to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Mozambique (from 1993-1996) and Peru (from 1996-1999) where he helped bring about the successful conclusion of one of the world's largest peacekeeping operations, enabling the country to hold its first democratic elections. For his efforts, he received the American Foreign Service Award Association's Christian Herter Award. He was subsequently appointed U.S. ambassador to Peru, where he managed the second largest aid program in Latin America and helped to open Peru's markets to U.S. companies.

Professor Jett was the Diplomat in Residence at the Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia from 1999-2000, through which he led election observation missions to Venezuela and Guatemala and conflict resolution efforts between Uganda and Sudan. He then joined the University of Florida in 2000, where he taught classes in globalization and foreign policy as well as serving as dean of the International Center.

Beverly Mack

Beverly Mack is a Professor of African Studies in the Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. She has conducted extended field research on Muslim women poets, performers, and scholars in Kano, Nigeria, and Fes, Morocco. Her research has been funded by grants from the Carnegie Corporation, Fulbright Hays, Woodrow Wilson, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Association of University Women. Prior to joining KU, she taught at Georgetown and Yale Universities. Since 1995 at KU she has taught courses on Women and Islam, Islamic Literature, and Introduction to Arabic and Islamic Studies. Her books include: Hausa Women in the Twentieth Century (with Catherine Coles) (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) and Muslim Women Sing: Hausa Popular Song (Indiana University Press, 2004), and several works on 19^th C Sufi scholar Nana Asma’u with her colleague Jean Boyd, including three books: The Collected Works of Nana Asma’u, Daughter of Shehu Usman dan Fodiyo, 1793-1864 (Michigan State University Press, 1997), One Woman’s Jihad: Nana Asma’u, Scholar and Scribe (Indiana University Press, 2001), and Educating Muslim Women:  the West African Legacy of Nana Asma’u (London: Interface Press, 2013).

Buba Misawa

Buba Misawa, Ph.D., is a professor of political science at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, PA. He received a B.Sc. (Honors) degree from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria (1981), and a Masters of Public and International Affairs (MPIA) from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh (1985), and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pittsburgh (1992). Dr. Misawa served as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh (1992-1994).  He was appointed assistant professor of political science at Washington and Jefferson College in 1995. He continued to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Political Science in the Department of Africana Studies, University of Pittsburgh until 2008.  He was also a visiting professor at the Saint Mary's University (Canada) Extension Program, Banjul, Gambia in 1999.  Prior to attending graduate school in the United States, Misawa taught at the University of Maiduguri, Nigeria (1982-83). In addition to his graduate degrees, Professor Misawa holds a certificate in International Security from the University of Pittsburgh.

His research interests include Nigerian foreign policy; conflicts and West African security; and US foreign policy towards Africa. Misawa has published on Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Middle East and Africa, African Chieftaincy, and the Dafur conflict in the Sudan. He is currently working on a book: The dimensions of African Security Problems; and co-author of another book (Forthcoming, December 2014): The Making of a Chief Servant: The Biography of the Talban Minna and Governor of Niger State, Nigeria.

Professor Misawa is the recipient of many distinguished research honors such as: The International Public Service Award, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), University of Pittsburgh, 2009 (an Award given to GSPIA Alumni); the Rotary International Scholarship for University Teachers (1999); the Fulbright-Hays Summer Travel Grant for research (to Ghana, 2003 & 2007); the Washington and Jefferson College’s President’s Entrepreneurial Fund for Summer Research (2005); and the University of Maiduguri Overseas Study Fellowship (1983-1987).  He has been a consultant to the University of the Gambia in numerous ways since its founding.  Misawa was a member of the International panel that set up the University of the Gambia (UTG) in 2000.  

Professor Misawa has completed numerous study trips to The Gambia and Senegal with students from Washington & Jefferson College, the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and Juniata College, since 2001.  

Kim Searcy

Kim Searcy (Ph.D., Indiana University, 2004; B.S., University of Indianapolis, 1989) is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago where he teaches courses on Islam, Islam in East Africa, African history, slavery in Muslim Africa, and Islam in the African American experience.

Prof. Searcy has written extensively on the Sudan and the historical impact of African slavery in the Sudan. His first book, The Formation of the Sudanese Mahdist State: Symbols and Ceremony, 1882-1898 (Brill, 2010) is part of Brill’s “Islam in Africa” series.  Prof. Searcy has examined Sufism, the Mahdi's attitudes on slavery, the slave trade, and emancipation, as well as the impact of charismatic authority on the Khalifa.  His current research examines the Muslim Brotherhood in northern Africa, specifically comparing the evolution of the Brotherhood in Egypt and the Sudan in the second half of the twentieth century.

Prof. Searcy previously taught at Colorado College (1999-2000, 2003), the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (2000-01, 2002), Oberlin College (2001-2002, 2003) and Lehman College of the City University of New York (2003). Currently, he teaches such courses as “Survey of Islam,” “African History Since 1600,” “Slavery in Muslim Africa,” and “Islam in the African-American Experience.”

Prof. Searcy’s research interests include African studies, Near Eastern languages and cultures, Islamic revivalism in 19^th century Africa, slavery in Muslim societies, the role of Islamic mysticism in African Islamic polities, Islam and the African Diaspora.