African Landscapes
Spring 2005/Fall 2005
An African Studies/Environmental Studies Series

The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize went to Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and human rights campaigner. The committee wrote that"Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment" and of the importance of developing"ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa." Emory's"African Landscapes" series brings together leading scholars working on Africa and the environment to create a unique dialogue between scientists and humanists. This Spring 2005/Fall 2005 seriescombines public lectures with intensive seminar discussions on topics ranging from food to malaria. Our goal is to envision new and sustainable communities of conversation and research about Africa and the environment.

Past Lectures and Seminars

September 22-23 2005: African Studies and Environmental Studies Distinguished Lecture
William Beinart, Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, Saint Anthony's College, Oxford University, United Kingdom

Biography: Professor William Beinart , Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Saint Anthony's College of Oxford University, specializes in southern African history and in environmental history and politics. He also teaches and supervises students on contemporary politics in South Africa. He has recently edited a volume with JoAnn McGregor, Social History and African Environments (2003) from the St Antony's conference on African Environments: Past and Present. A second edition of Twentieth-Century South Africa (2001) and a book on The Rise of Conservation in South Africa, 1770-1950 (2003) have been published by OUP. He is currently working on an overview of Environment and Empire.

January 27-28, 2005
Judith Carney, Professor of Geography, UCLA

Biography: Judith Carney is Professor of Geography at UCLA. After earning her Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Carney joined the Department of Geography at UCLA where she has been since 1988. Her research and teaching focus on questions related to environment and development in West Africa as well as the African Diaspora. Her numerous publications include Triticale Production in the Central Mexican Highlands: Smallholders' Experience and Lessons for Research (Mexico City: CIMMYT, 1991) and Black Rice. The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001 and 2002). Black Rice won the African Studies Association's Melville Herskovits Book Award in 2002 and the Association of American Geographers' James M. Blaut Innovative Publication Award in 2003. She is currently working on a book manuscript for Harvard University Press on Africa's Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World.

February 10 and March 11, 2005
Beth Christensen, Assistant Professor, Department of Geology, Georgia State University

Biography:
Dr. Christensen earned her Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 1997 after receiving her B.S. and M.S. from Rutgers University. Beth Christensen is interested in the climate changes that the earth has experienced, and the expression of these climate changes in sediments. Most of her research focuses on the response of sediments on continental margins to sea-level change. Recently she has begun to investigate sedimentation on the New Jersey shelf as part of the GEOCLUTTER initiative funded by the Office of Naval Research. This work includes drilling cores on the NJ shelf and determining the depositional environment from the foraminifera. She is also actively involved in a research program focusing on South Africa and Namibia. ODP Leg 175 recovered sediments from the Cape Basin. Her research, which is part of a collaborative project, is using the biogenic component to construct a paleoceanographic history (foraminifera, stable isotopes) and the terrigenous component to develop a record of continental climate change.

March 24-25, 2005
James McCann, Professor of History, Boston University

Biography: James McCann is currently Professor of History and Associate Director for Development in the African Studies Center at Boston University. Dr. McCann received his Ph.D. in history from MSU in 1984. He is the author of Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (Harvard, 2005); Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800-1999 (Heinemann, 1999), People of the Plow: An Agricultural History of Ethiopia, 1800-1995 ( Wisconsin, 1995) and From Poverty to Famine in Northeast Ethiopia: A Rural History, 1900-35 (U Penn, 1987). Both Poverty to Famine and People of the Plow won the Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award respectively in 1987-8 and in 1996. He has served as a consultant to the International Centre for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, the United Nations Environmental Program, Oxfam (U.K.), Oxfam America, The Norwegian Institute for Human Rights, and Redd Barna (Norwegian Save the Children).

April 21-22 ,2005
J. Terrence McCabe, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Faculty Research Associate, Institute of Behavioral Science, University Colorado, Boulder

Biography: J. Terrence McCabe earned his Ph.D. at SUNY-Binghamton in 1985, and is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Research Associate at the Institute of Behavioral Science's Environment and Behavior Program at the University Colorado in Boulder. McCabe's research interests focus on human adaptations to arid land and savanna ecosystems, with a special emphasis on nomadic pastoralism. He has worked primarily in East Africa with extensive fieldwork conducted with both the Turkana of Kenya and the Maasai of Tanzania. Recently he has examined the impact of conservation policy on the economy of Maasai pastoralists and participated in a multidisciplinary study on the impact of pastoral land use on the biodiversity of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania. Terrence McCabe's publications include a monograph written with R. Dyson-Hudson, entitled South Turkana Nomadism: Coping with an Unpredictably Varying Environment (Human Relation Area Files Book, 1985), and his recently published Cattle Bring Us to Our Enemies: Ecological Disequilibrium, Politics, and Raiding among the Turkana of Kenya (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

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