History graduates receive NEH Endowment for the Humanities grant

Dear UCLA Colleagues and Friends, We wanted to share some exciting news that is both the fruiting of our training at UCLA and sustained research and writing we have been doing since we left our lives as students to become professional Africanist historians in other parts of the nation. We have been collaborating for five years on several projects related to gender in regions of Africa where Bantu languages are spoken. The NEH Endowment for the Humanities announced on August 9, 2016 awards for the 2015 application cycle.  We were awarded a Collaborative Award in the amount of $200,000 for a period of three years 2016-2019. The collaboration turns gender history on its head, leaving all assumptions behind. We want to ask such questions as, “Is gender a recent construct in Africa? If so, what existed before gender and what was its relationship to authority and power in Africa? Should we assume men have always held more economic, political and social power and authority than women?” All three collaborators earned BA and MA degrees in various fields at UCLA as well as PhD degrees (‘96 and ‘02) from UCLA. We send many thanks to faculty we worked closely with while at UCLA including Ned Alpers, Karen Brodkin, Chris Ehret, Sondra Hale, Juan Gomez-Quiñónes, Thomas Hinnebusch, Edmond Keller, Deo Ngonyani, the late Boiface Obichere, and Merrick Posnansky.Catherine Cymone Fourshey is Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Bucknell University. Fourshey’s published research focuses on, agriculture, hospitality, migration, and the intersections of environment, economy, and politics in precolonial Tanzania. She is working a book manuscript titled Strangers, Immigrants and the Established: Hospitality as State Building Mechanism in Southwest Tanzania 300–1900 CE. She recently completed a co-authored manuscript entitled Bantu Africa, which is being published by OUP. Fourshey has conducted research and published on Gender in Africa both in precolonial and colonial spaces. She completed eighteen months of dissertation research in Southwestern Tanzania and northern Zambia, with archival work in Tanzania, England, Germany, and The Gambia. Additionally, Fourshey has been getting to know a group of immigrants/refugees from East Africa who have been settled all over the United States. These people have come to be known in international aid and development circles as “the Bantu Somali”. While about 11,000 from this community were resettled in cities across the United States from Seattle, WA to San Antonio, TX to Atlanta, GA and Hartford, Conn, about 100,000 remain in refugee camps in Kenya, another nearly 100,000 in Somalia, and between 5 and 10,000 in Tanzania. Fourshey’s research has been funded by UCLA’s African Studies Center, Notre Dame University’s Erskine Peters Dissertation Fellowship, American Association of University Women Dissertation Grant, a Fulbright Research Grant, and NEH. Catherine Cymone FoursheyBucknell UniversityAssociate Professor of HistoryMacArthur Chair of History and International Relations Rhonda M. Gonzales is an Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora History and Director for PIVOT for Academic Success at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She was and American Council on Education Fellow at New Jersey City University in 2014-2015. As a first-generation college student, she is passionate about envisioning and implementing programming and best practices that support first-generation, transition, low SES, and STEM retention through graduation. In late 2015 she was awarded a $3.25 million Department of Education Title V Grant to build four new programs at UTSA: F2G&G, RTE, Alamo Runners, and Math Matters. Andrew Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, and The American Historical Association have supported her comparative historical linguistic and archival research on women their roles in sustaining and transforming society through religion, medicine and economy in both precolonial Africa and in the African Diaspora in Mexico. Societies, Religion, and History: Central East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE.  A co-authored book, Bantu Africa, 3500 BCE-1500 CE is forthcoming with Oxford University Press entitled Bantu Africa, c. 3500 BCE to 1800 CE.Rhonda M. Gonzales is from Long Beach, California. She holds a BA in Sociology and an MA and PhD in History from UCLA. Rhonda M. GonzalesThe University of Texas at San AntonioAssociate Professor of HistoryDirector, PIVOT for Academic SuccessAmerican Council on Education Fellow, 2014-2015  Christine (Ahmed-Choi) Saidi is Associate Professor of African History at Kutztown University (a state university serving first-generation students). Saidi is the recipient of three prestigious Fulbright Fellowships, a Social Science Research Council Grant, and a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies grant. She was instrumental in establishing the Center for the Study of Gender in Africa at the African Studies Center at UCLA. She conducted research in Somalia and in The White Fathers’ Archive, Rome, and later in Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. She has authored a book, Women’s Authority and Society in Early East-African History, many scholarly articles and is completing a co-authored a book. Christine (Ahmed-Choi) SaidiKutztown UniversityAssociate Professor