Barbara Watson Andaya
Barbara Watson Andaya is a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawai’i, where she teaches courses on gender, religion, and the evolution of Southeast Asian studies. She is currently involved in research on the localization of Christianity in pre-twentieth-century Southeast Asia. The author of several books and articles on the history of the Malacca Straits region, including a co-authored A History of Malaysia (University of Hawaii Press), she lived in Malaysia in the early 1970s, and still returns regularly to visit.
Leonard Y. Andaya
Leonard Y. Andaya is a professor of history at the University of Hawai’i, where he teaches courses on Southeast Asian history and a senior tutorial on Asia and the Pacific. He has written extensively on the precolonial period of Malaysian history and has coauthored A History of Malaysia (University of Hawaii Press) with Barbara Watson Andaya. He returns regularly to Malaysia as visiting professor to different Malaysian universities. He is currently writing a history of eastern Indonesia in the early-modern period using a sea perspective.
Melanie Sue Byrd
Dr. Byrd is a professor of history at Valdosta State University, where she teaches various courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, ancient history, and cultural history. Her dissertation research focused on the history of archaeology and the interest in ancient Egypt that arose from the French Occupation of Egypt under Napoleon Bonaparte, 1798–1801.
Julia Clancy-Smith
Julia Clancy-Smith is a professor of history at the University of Arizona, where she teaches courses on North Africa, the Middle East, and Islam as well as women’s and world history. She has just published a monograph, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900 (University of California Press). Clancy-Smith is currently finishing a book on the history of French colonial education. Her first encounters with North Africa were in 1971 as a student and then in 1973 and 1974 as a Peace Corps volunteer. She has been returning to the region regularly for research ever since.
Nina Ergin
Nina Ergin is an assistant professor of art history at Koç University in Turkey, where she teaches courses on Ottoman architecture and the history of Istanbul, among other topics. Since 2005 she has been a permanent resident of the city, after already having spent several years working there and researching the history of Turkish bathhouses for her PhD.
Erik Gilbert is a professor of history at Arkansas State University, where he teaches world history, African history, and heritage studies. He is currently working on a history of the Indian Ocean and the history of rice in East Africa. He grew up in West Africa but spent several years of his adult life in coastal East Africa, including a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Zanzibar, where he did research on the dhow trade.
Reuel R. Hanks
Reuel Hanks is a professor of geography at Oklahoma State University and serves as the editor of the Journal of Central Asian Studies. Dr. Hanks was a Fulbright Scholar in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1995 and has published more than a dozen articles and book chapters on Central Asia and Islam, nationalism and identity, foreign policy, and political geography.
Andy I. R. Herries
Andy Herries is part of the archeology program at the School of Historical and European Studies and a member of the faculty of humanities and social sciences department at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Christopher Howell
Christopher Howell is a professor of history and anthropology at Red Rocks College, where he teaches courses in archaeology and ancient history and is currently involved in research on the role of seafaring in shaping Africa past and present. He has visited Africa numerous times over the past decade, including the Hadar region in Ethiopia, carrying out field research on a variety of historical and anthropological topics.
Keith N. Knapp
Keith Knapp is a professor and the head of the history department at the Citadel, where he teaches courses on East Asian history and researches the history and culture of early medieval China (100–700 CE). He has spent three and a half years living in China and Taiwan; besides visiting Xian numerous times, he has also participated in an archaeological excavation there.
Nita Kumar
Nita Kumar is a professor of history at Claremont McKenna College, where she teaches courses in modernity, everyday life, history, and culture and is currently involved in research on education, children, and families. She has spent thirty years visiting and working on Banaras/Varanasi, studying it from various angles: urbanism, artisans, women and gender, and, now, education. She is also the honorary director of NIRMAN, a nonprofit based in Banaras/Varanasi that works for children, youth, and the arts.
Maritere López
Maritere López is an associate professor of history at California State University, Fresno, where she teaches courses in early-modern European history, including the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment periods. She is currently involved in research on gender and education during the Italian Enlightenment. She has traveled multiple times to Italy, conducting research and learning the ways of the Italians.
Michael Christopher Low is a PhD candidate in international and global history at Columbia University. He is the author of the article, “Empire and the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and Pan-Islam under British Surveillance, 1865–1908” from the International Journal of Middle East Studies (2008), which he is currently expanding into a dissertation. His research and teaching interests include the Ottoman Empire, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Indian Ocean. Although his travels throughout the Islamic world have taken him across much of North and West Africa, the Middle East, and India, his longest sojourns and favorite destinations for research and language training in Arabic and Turkish have been Sana‘a’, Yemen, and Istanbul, Turkey.
Aran S. MacKinnon
Dr. Aran S. MacKinnon is a professor of history and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of The Making of South Africa (Prentice Hall) and coauthor of an Introduction to Global Studies (Wiley-Blackwell) as well as numerous scholarly articles on South African history. He earned his PhD from the University of London and his MA in history from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, where he lived and taught for over four years. He currently teaches courses on South African, African, and world history as well as global studies.
Elaine McClarnand MacKinnon
Elaine MacKinnon is a professor of Russian and Soviet history at the University of West Georgia. She is the translator and editor of Mass Uprisings in the USSR (M. E. Sharpe), and has written an array of journal articles, book chapters, and review essays on Russian and Soviet history. She earned her MA and PhD in modern European history at Emory University, and she currently teaches courses on world history, Russian and Soviet history, and the Cold War.
Jane E. Mangan
Jane Mangan is an associate professor of history at Davidson College, specializing in colonial history of Latin America. She lived in Potosí while researching her first book, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Duke University Press, 2005), and followed a trail of silver inheritance from Potosí to Spain as the inspiration for her second book project on transatlantic families in the sixteenth century.
Nadejda Popov
Nadejda Popov is an assistant professor of history at the University of West Georgia, where she teaches courses in Greek and Roman history as well as the first half of the world history survey. Her research focus is Greek and Roman warfare. She grew up in Israel and has traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean, especially Greece.