Experts Bring Africa Alive for Young Students

Missed Opportunity Hurt US-African Relations for Decades

For the last half-century the United States has undermined itself in Africa by failing to distinguish itself from Europe and the colonial legacy, says Haskell Sears Ward, one of the first to graduate from UCLA with an interdisciplinary master's degree in African studies.

Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad (GPA) Short Term Seminar to Morocco

13 teachers will get the opportunity to participate in a five-week intensive travel study program in Morocco

Alumnus to Speak on US Relations with Africa

Haskell Sears Ward, an expert on development and one of the first UCLA graduate students in African Studies, will focus his Thursday afternoon talk on what Africa and the United States have meant to one another for the past 50 years.

Venues of Transformation

Damola Osinulu, a doctoral student in the Department of World Arts and Cultures, took his International Fieldwork Fellowship to Lagos, Nigeria, to understand why at least a million Pentecostal worshippers come together just north of the city.

State Department Official Provides African Security Briefing

In a public talk Louis Mazel, director of the U.S. Department of State Office of African Regional and Security Affairs, discusses current and potential security issues across the continent, including the uncertain future of South Sudan.

No One China in Africa

Miners' success in improving working conditions at a Chinese-owned copper mine in Zambia tells one story about Chinese economic influence on the continent. But it's too early to say what the country's investments in Africa add up to, says UCLA sociologist Ching Kwan Lee.

10 Questions for Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Ostrich feathers for women's hats were worth nearly as much as diamonds by weight just prior to World War I, when the bubble burst. In "Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce" (Yale University Press), a book that resonates with the current financial crisis, UCLA historian Sarah Abrevaya Stein describes a European and American vogue for African feathers from the 1880s and recounts sad tales of a global market crash that struck particularly hard at Jewish merchants.

Bringing Africa to the Classroom

Organizers offered practical ways for the nearly 200 teachers to move beyond stereotypes about African disease, poverty, and chaos on the one hand, and safari animals and exotic customs on the other.

Rwanda as an African Model

Veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer talks about his latest book, on President Paul Kagame's role in the amazing rise of Rwanda.

The Bird in the Top of the Tree

Alain Mabanckou left behind a legal career to achieve acclaim as a poet, a biographer, and an award-winning novelist.

Teach Africa Launches SoCal K-12 Program at UCLA

Teach Africa advocates more and better teaching about the continent in the schools. The launch event brought distinguished guests to UCLA along with high-schoolers and teachers back from a Ugandan trip.

Art and AIDS

AIDS/SIDA symposium mixes one part science and one part art to raise awareness about HIV prevention and the treatment of the disease. View a slideshow from the event.

A Fiddle's Deep Roots

Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje is an international expert on things she once snubbed, with articles on gospel and spirituals and a new book on fiddling, "Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures."

Can People Power Change Kenya?

Resolving the election crisis of 2007-08 is one thing, argues GRCA Research Associate Stephen Ndegwa, and addressing underlying injustices is quite another. Ndegwa and an engaged UCLA audience debate the likelihood of significant change from below.

Hip Hop Working Group

The Graduate Quarterly profiles UCLA students who are looking at a global movement in music from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Former Cape Verdean President Sees Africa Standing Up

Antonio Mascarenhas Monteiro, who served two five-year terms as Cape Verde's first president elected under a multiparty system, tells a UCLA audience that Africa is no lost cause, but a continent striving towards peace and democracy. He discusses Cape Verde's relations with China and other emerging powers.

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