Centre of African Studies

Dr Harri Englund, Reader in Social Anthropology and fellow of Churchill College, succeeded Professor Megan Vaughan as Director of the Centre of African Studies when she stepped down from 2 October 2012 after more than three years at the helm. Dr Englund's research interests are South-Central Africa; human rights and the moral imagination; liberal governance and socio-economic inequality; African language, media and literature; African Christianities; displacement and migration; translation and poetry. Dr Englund is on sabbatical leave in the 2013 Lent and Easter terms. Dr Chris Warnes is Acting Director in Lent term and Professor David Maxwell is Acting Director in Easter term 2013.
The Centre would like to thank Professor Megan Vaughan for her sterling efforts during her tenure which included the introduction of the Audrey Richards annual lecture attracting large audiences; a successful new MPhil course in African Studies in 2010, and the relocation of the Centre to the Alison Richard Building in January 2012. In addition, her boundless energy and enthusiasm have been directed towards securing new grants (Carnegie/Alborada Trust) and the continuation of the Cambridge/Africa collaborative research programme.

The Centre has appointed Mr George H. Karekwaivanane (D.Phil. History, Oxford University) as the new Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies.
George Karekwaivanane's research interests are in African social and political history. He is interested in exploring the ways that law and legal struggles can be used to shed light on social and political processes in African history.He is currently completing a doctoral project which examines the ways that law was deployed in the constitution and contestation of state power and legitimacy in Zimbabwe between 1950 and 1990.Among other things, the project analyses to the way that the law was deployed instrumentally and discursively in struggles between Africans and the state and how this shifted over time. His next project will focus on the role of African legal professionals in Zimbabwean history.It examines the experiences of these individuals as well as their influence on the way social and political struggles have been pursued.

Adam Higazi
King's College Cambridge and the Centre of African Studies would like to announce the appointment of Mr Adam Higazi to a Research Fellowship in African Studies. The appointment is from 1 October 2010 for four years. Adam Higazi specialises on northern Nigerian history, politics and ethnography. He is completing a DPhil at Oxford (St Antony's College and the Oxford Department of International Development) on collective violence in Plateau State, based on fieldwork in the city of Jos and in rural areas of north-central Nigeria. The line of research, which will be taken further and deeper at Cambridge, spans contemporary Nigerian politics and society; the political and social history of northern Nigeria (especially the middle belt); and ethnic and religious movements, assertion and militancy. It also includes the study of agrarian issues in northern Nigeria, especially Fulani pastoralism, farmer-pastoralist relations, and the environment. Previously read social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (MA, 2001); taught classes/tutorials in history and politics, qualitative research methods, and an ethnographic course on West Africa, at Oxford and SOAS. Key publications to date are in the journals 'Africa' and 'Politique africaine'. He has also written on issues of development policy - on 'policy levers' and conflict prevention in Ghana; on informal migrant remittances between the UK and Ghana; and on EU development and migration policies.

Dr Ruth Prince
Ruth Prince was the Mellon Teaching Fellow from January 2011 to December 2012.
From October to December 2010, Ruth Prince was working on a Wellcome Trust-funded collaborative pilot project on "Producing Public Health in the African City: A study of Street Level Health Workers", together with anthropologists and historians at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Research Interests: history and ethnography of medicine, health and healing; memory and material culture; politics of knowledge; the anthropology of the state and development in Africa; public health and the African city; postcolonial studies of science; African Christianities and public culture; African ethnography with a focus on East Africa.
Affiliations: Research Associate, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge;
Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology, Research group in Law, Organization, Science and Technology
http://www.eth.mpg.de/cms/en/research/mpfg01/bio-africa.html;
Anthropologies of African Biosciences group, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine http://aab.lshtm.ac.uk/?q=node/3 ...
More about Ruth Prince here