DOROTHY L. HODGSON is Professor of Anthropology and the Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the Graduate School-New Brunswick at Rutgers University, where she was a founding member of the Center for African Studies. She has previously served as Chair and Graduate Director of the Department of Anthropology, Director of the Rutgers’ Institute for Research on Women, President of the African Studies Association, and President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. As a historical anthropologist, she has worked in Tanzania, East Africa, for over thirty years on such topics as gender, ethnicity, cultural politics, colonialism, nationalism, modernity, the missionary encounter, transnational organizing, and the indigenous rights movement. She is the author of Gender, Justice and the Problem of Culture: From Customary Law to Human Rights in Tanzania (Indiana University Press, 2017), Being Maasai, Becoming Indigenous: Postcolonial Politics in a Neoliberal World (Indiana University Press, 2011), The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries (Indiana University Press, 2005), and Once Intrepid Warriors: Gender, Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Maasai Development (Indiana University Press, 2001); editor of The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader (Oxford University Press, 2016), Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives (Palgrave, 2001), and Rethinking Pastoralism in Africa: Gender, Culture and the Myth of the Patriarchal Pastoralist (James Currey, 2000); and coeditor of Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2017) and “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa (Heinemann, 2001). Her work has been supported by awards and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
JUDITH A. BYFIELD is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Cornell University. She received her PhD from Columbia University. Her current research focuses on women’s social and economic history in colonial Nigeria. She is the author of The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890–1940 (Heinemann, 2002) as well as articles in edited volumes and journals such as Meridians: A Journal on Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism, the Journal of African History, and the Canadian Journal of African Studies. She is a coeditor of Global Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2017), Africa and World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (Indiana University Press, 2010) and the editor of Cross Currents: Building Bridges across American and Nigerian Studies (Ibadan, Nigeria: Book Builders, 2009). Byfield serves in a number of organizational capacities: Co-Program Chair, The Seventeenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities (2017); Advisory Board, Cambridge University Press—New Perspectives in African History (2013–present); President of the African Studies Association (2011); and Chair of the Association of African Studies Programs (2002–5). Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships and awards including the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Senior Scholar, Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship—University of Michigan, and Andrew Mellon Fellowship—Dartmouth College.