Harvard University
April 13-14, 2008
Conference program
SUNDAY EVENING
8:00-10:00 Keynote Presentations
(Tsai Auditorium S010, CGIS-South Building,1730 Cambridge Street)
Welcoming Remarks:
Jacob Olupona, Chair, Committee on African Studies
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Chair, Dept. of African and African American Studies and Acting Director, W.E.B. DuBois Institute
Keynote speeches by Dr. Getatchew Haile and Rebecca G. Haile
“Unto the Second Generation: Dual Perspectives on the Ethiopian Diaspora.”
Session Moderators: Kay Kaufman Shelemay and Steven Kaplan
MONDAY MORNING
(All Monday daytime sessions will take place at the Barker Center, Thompson Room 110, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge)
Monday Morning Session #1:
2000 E.C., Dawn of the Ethiopian Diaspora?
Welcoming Remarks: Diana Sorensen, Dean of the Humanities and James F. Rothenberg Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures
Solomon Addis Getahun, Jon Abbink, Kay Kaufman Shelemay
Session Moderator and Commentator: James McCann
9:00-10:30
10:30-11:00 Break
Monday Morning Session #2:
Reading and Discussion by Dinaw Mengestu from his novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Session Moderator and Commentator: Francis Abiola Irele
11:00-12:00
12:00-1:30 Lunch Break
MONDAY AFTERNOON
Monday Afternoon Session #1:
Diaspora Links: Networks for Communication Among Ethiopian Americans
Nancy Hafkin, Mahdi Omar, Elias Wondimu
Session Moderator and Commentator: Emmanuel Akyeampong
1:30-3:00
3:00-3:30 Break
Monday Afternoon Session #2:
The Visual Arts in Ethiopian Diaspora Life
Marilyn Heldman, Achamyeleh Debela, Leah Niederstadt
Session Moderator and Commentator: Ingrid Monson
3:30-5:00
Monday Afternoon Session #3:
Summary Discussion:What Does the Ethiopian Case Study Teach Us About New African Communities in the United States?
Donald Levine, Terrence Lyons, Steven Kaplan
Session Moderator and Commentator: Jacob Olupona
5:00-6:00
MONDAY EVENING
(Sanders Theatre, Memorial Hall, 45 Quincy Street, Cambridge)
MULATU ASTATKE AND THE EITHER/ORCHESTRA CONCERT
Works of Mulatu Astatke, performed by Mulatu Astatke and the Either/Orchestra, with premieres.
8:00-10:00
CONFERENCE PARTICIPANTS
Jon Abbink, Professor of African Studies, VU University, Amsterdam, and senior researcher, African Studies Centre, Leiden, the Netherlands
Abbink has carried out fieldwork with Beta Israel in Israel, with various ethnic groups in Southern Ethiopia, and on political culture and religious relations in Ethiopia. He is the author of some 150 articles, several monographs and edited works, among them (with I. van Kessel) Vanguard or Vandals. Politics, Youth and Conflict in Africa (2005). _The recipient of various research grants, e.g., from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, CNRS, and various Dutch academic foundations, in Spring 2007 he was a visiting professor at the Asia-Africa Institute of Hamburg University, Germany.
Emmanuel Akyeampong, Harvard College Professor and Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Emmanuel Akyeampong is a social historian with research and teaching interests in environmental history, disease and medicine, and comparative slavery and the African Diaspora. Akyeampong is also the President of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (US), a non-profit organization of academic researchers, and African broadcasters and producers dedicated to research and the production of development-oriented programming for broadcast in Africa via television, radio and the Internet.
Mulatu Astatke, Composer and Performer, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)
Mulatu Astatke is a virtuoso vibraphonist and keyboardist known as a composer and the innovator of Ethio-jazz. Trained in Ethiopia, England, and at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, he has lived a transnational musical life engaged with musical performance, research, and media work at home in Ethiopia and as a composer and performer in musical circles internationally. In 2005, Mulatu’s music was featured in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers and he received the 2006 SEED (Society for Ethiopians Established in the Diaspora) Award.
Achamyeleh Debela, Professor of Art, North Carolina Central University
Achamyeleh Debela specializes in multi-media arts, as well as computer graphics and painting. Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa, as well as in Nigeria and the United States, he recently collaborated with curator Rebecca Martin Nagy in researching, curating, and publishing a catalogue for an exhibition titled Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists at the Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida.
Solomon Addis Getahun, Assistant Professor of History, Central Michigan University
Trained both in Ethiopia and at Michigan State University, Solomon Addis Getahun’s research spans African and African diaspora history, including contemporary African refugee and immigrant communities in the U.S., urbanization, identity politics in the Horn of Africa, and U.S. foreign policy towards the Horn. His recent publications include The History of Ethiopian Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S. (2007) and The History of the City of Gondar (2006), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Currently, he is collaborating on two book projects: Culture and Customs of Ethiopia with Prof. Hakeem Tijani and History of Ethiopian Refugees in Seattle with Professor Joseph W. Scott.
Nancy J. Hafkin, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa, ret. and Director, Knowledge Working
Nancy Hafkin worked for UNECA in Addis Ababa for 25 years, establishing the program to promote information technology for African development. Since her retirement, she has been writing on information technology in developing countries, with particular emphasis on gender issues. Recent publications include Gender, Information Technology and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study (USAID, 2001), Cinderella or Cyberella: Empowering Women in the Knowledge Society (Kumarian Press, 2006) and Engendering the Knowledge Society: Measuring the Participation of Women (ORBICOM, 2007). In 2000 the Association for Progressive Communication established an annual Nancy Hafkin Prize for creativity in information technology in Africa.
Getatchew Haile, Curator of the Ethiopian Study Center and Regents Professor of Medieval Studies at St. John’s University
Getatchew Haile is a scholar of Ethiopian literature and history who arrived in the United States in 1976. A MacArthur Fellow and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Dr. Getatchew is a former member of the Ethiopian Parliament and a leading figure in the Ethiopian diaspora. Among his recent scholarly publications are his editions and translations of The Ge’ez Acts of Abba Estifanos of Gwendagwende (2006) and The Mariology of Emperor Zär’a Ya’eqob (Tomarä Tesbet) (1992).
Rebecca G. Haile, Attorney and Author
Rebecca Haile is a graduate of Williams College and the Harvard Law School. Born in Ethiopia in 1965, she came to the United States at age 11 in the wake of the Ethiopian revolution. She is the author of Held at A Distance: My Rediscovery of Ethiopia (2007).
Marilyn Heldman, Adjunct Professor of Art History, American University
An art historian, curator, and expert on Ethiopian painting, architecture, and manuscript illumination, Marilyn Heldman’s work has revealed the dialogue of Ethiopian arts with traditions abroad, including those of the Eastern Mediterranean world and of Europe. She is the author of African Zion: the Sacred Art of Ethiopia (1993) and The Marian Icons of the Painter Fre Seyon (1994), as well as numerous articles. Heldman has been a Fellow at the Harvard Center of Byzantine Studies, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, and the recipient of foundation grants, including from the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Francis Abiola Irele, Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies and of Romance Languages and Literatures
Irele is the editor of many collections of African and Caribbean literature in English and French, and has published two collections of his own essays: The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora. He was President of the African Literature Association in 1992-1993 and is currently a member of the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association.
Steven Kaplan, Professor of Comparative Religion and African Studies, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)
Steven Kaplan is a scholar of Christianity and Judaism in Ethiopia. His books and articles span a wide range of topics including the history of Ethiopian monasticism, studies of Ethiopian historical and religious texts, the Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia, as well as extensive fieldwork among the large Ethiopian (Jewish) community in Israel. Kaplan is currently researching Ethiopian Christian cultural adaptation in the United States.
Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago
Donald Levine is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (1965) and Greater Ethiopia (1974; 2nd ed, 2000), in recent years Levine has turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, in 2004 Professor Levine was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University.
Terrence Lyons, Associate Professor at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies, George Mason University.
Terrence Lyons specializes in comparative politics and international relations with particular emphasis on conflicts and transnational politics in Africa. He has authored and edited a number of academic and policy-oriented studies, including Conflict-Generated Diasporas and Transnational Politics in Ethiopia (2007) and The Ethiopian Extended Dialogue: An Analytical Report 2000-2003 (2004).
James McCann, Professor of History, Boston University
James McCann is an historian who has published books and articles on a wide range of subjects in Ethiopian history and environmental studies. A former fellow of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University (2005-2006), McCann recently won the George Perkins Marsh Prize for his book Maize and Grace (2005). He has just completed a book manuscript titled Stirring the Pot: African Cuisine and Globalization, 1500-2000.
Dinaw Mengestu, Author
Born in Addis Ababa in 1978, Dinaw immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1980, where he attended Georgetown University and received an MFA from Columbia University. He has published the acclaimed novel, named a 2007 New York Times notable book, about the Ethiopian diaspora titled The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears. Dinaw Mengestu has been the Lannan Visiting Writer at Georgetown University, and is the recipient of the National Book Foundations “5 Under 35 Award,” a Lannan Fiction Fellowship, and the 2007 Guardian First Book Award.
Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Supported by the Time Warner Endowment, Department of Music, and Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University
Ingrid Monson is Chair of the Harvard Music Department and both a scholar and accomplished performer of jazz. The author of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, which won the Sonneck Society’s Irving Lowens Award for the best book published on American music in 1996, she has edited The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000), and recently published Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967 (2007). Monson has also carried out fieldwork in Mali, where she specializes in the music of the balafon and of balafon virtuoso Neba Solo.
Leah Niederstadt, Assistant Professor of Museum Studies, Art History and Curator of the College’s Permanent Collection, Wheaton College
A 1994 Rhodes Scholar from the University of Michigan, Niederstadt completed graduate work in Anthropology at the University of Oxford (England) and in Museum Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor). She specializes in contemporary expressive culture in Ethiopia and is particularly interested in the production and consumption of painting and sculpture and of HIV/AIDS-related performance. A contributor to Painting Ethiopia: The Life and Work of Qes Adamu Tesfaw and Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists, Niederstadt will serve as co-editor for a forthcoming special edition on Ethiopia for the journal African Arts.
Jacob Olupona, Professor of African and African American Studies and Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard University
Jacob Olupona chairs the Committee on African Studies at Harvard. His publications include Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals (1991) and the forthcoming The City of 201 Gods. Olupona has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and many other agencies, and in 2000, received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Mahdi Omar, The African Television Network
Mahdi Omar is the founder and producer of The African _Television Network of New England, an innovative community-based network that brings African news, interviews, music and _information to Greater Boston neighborhoods.
Donald Levine, Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, University of Chicago
Donald Levine is an expert in classical social theory and modernization theory as well as a renowned scholar of Ethiopian culture. The author of two seminal monographs in Ethiopian studies, Wax and Gold (1965) and Greater Ethiopia (1974; 2nd ed, 2000), in recent years Levine has turned his attention to the Ethiopian diaspora. A former Guggenheim Fellow and Fellow at the Advanced Center for the Behavioral Sciences, in 2004 Professor Levine was awarded an honorary doctorate by Addis Ababa University.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University (Radcliffe Institute Fellow, 2007-2008)
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is an ethnomusicologist who has carried out fieldwork in Ethiopia, and with Ethiopians in Israel and the United States. She has published numerous books and articles on Ethiopian music, including the award-winning Music, Ritual, and Falasha History (1986/1989) and the three-volume Ethiopian Christian Liturgical Chant, An Anthology (1994-1997, with Peter Jeffery). A member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences and the 2007-2008 Chair for Modern Culture at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center, she has recently received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Elias Wondimu, Publisher
Elias Wondimu is the founder and head of Tsehai Publishers and Distributors in Los Angeles, which issues monographs and the International Journal of Ethiopian Studies. Former editor of the Ethiopian Review, Elias Wondimu arrived in the United States in 1994.