Academic, based in USA, experienced in written and oral expert reports in USA, Canada and UK, on many social groups and diverse matters including violence and torture.
QUALIFICATIONS: BA, MA, AM, PhD.
SPECIFIC 'AREAS' OF STUDY/EXPERTISE:
Prison, torture, military regimes, press/media, freedom of association, judicial/administrative systems in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, the Gambia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone.
Trafficking, slavery, smuggling, female genital cutting/mutilation (FGC/M), forced marriage, domestic violence, witchcraft/voodoo/juju, homosexuality/homophobia; citizenship, nationality; statelessness, children’s rights, medical access, medical/psychiatric care, throughout in sub-Saharan Africa.
COUNTRIES & 'INCOUNTRY' AREAS VISITED:
Most often to: Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, others.
Over 350 written reports and provided expertise in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Israel, South Korea, Hong Kong, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Over one hundred 'appearances' on the phone and at least fifty appearances in person in court - on political, religious, ethnic, cultural, sexual, gender, discrimination, violence and torture matters.
Conducted extensive research and published several articles, book chapters, and books on the subject of expert testimony [see Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony, with Galya Ruffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, with Iris Berger, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Joanna Tague, and Meredith Terretta (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015)].
SINGLE-AUTHORED BOOKS
2016 Les Ewés sur le Joug Français : le Colonialisme périurbain au Togo entre les guerres (Lomé, Togo: Éditions Les Graines du Pensées), édition française du Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’ traduit by Fidele Messan Nubukpo.
2014 Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and Smuggling (New Haven: Yale University Press) ISBN: 9780300198454
2007 Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’: Periurban Colonialism in Togo’s Eweland, 1900-1960 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press) ISBN: 9781580462648
EDITED ANTHOLOGIES
2017 Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness, with Jacqueline Stevens (Durham: Duke University Press) ISBN: 9780822362913
2016 Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa, with Anne Bunting and Richard L. Roberts (Athens: Ohio University Press), ISBN: 9780821422007
2015 African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, with Iris Berger, Tricia Redeker Hepner, Joanna Tague, and Meredith Terretta (Athens: Ohio University Press) ISBN: 9780821421383
2015 Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony, with Galya Ruffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) ISBN: 9781107069060
2012 Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experiences of Women and Children in Africa, with Richard L. Roberts. “New African Histories” Series (Athens: Ohio University Press) ISBN: 9780821420027
2012 Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History, with Carolyn Thomas de la Peña (New York: Routledge/Taylor Francis) ISBN: 9780415697750
2006 Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa, with Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press) ISBN: 0299219505 [Reissued in Paperback 9780299219543 (2015)].
2005 The Ewe of Togo and Benin, Volume III in the “Handbook of Eweland” series (Accra, Ghana: Woeli Publishing) ISBN: 9789988626549
PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES AND JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES
2016 “Boko Haram, Refugee Mimesis, and the Archive of Contemporary Gender-Based Violence,” Radical History Review Vol. 126
2015 “Boko Haram, Asylum, and Memes of Africa,” HAWWA: Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 13.2: 148-53
2014 “‘A full knowledge of the subject of slavery’: The Amistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies,” Slavery and Abolition Volume 35, Issue 4: 1-21
2013 “‘Your poor boy no father no mother’: ‘Orphans,’ Alienation, and the Perils of Atlantic Child Slave Biography,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Volume 36.4 (Fall), 672-703
2012/3 “Humanitarian Claims and Expert Testimonies: Contestation over Health Care for Ghanaian Migrants in the United Kingdom,” Ghana Studies Volume 15-16: Special Double Issue, “Health and Health Care,” 251-286
2011 “Traversing the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides,” with Carolyn de la Peña, Food & Foodways Special Issue about “Food Globality and Foodways Localities,” edited with Carolyn de la Peña, 19.1-2, 1-10
2008 “Trading children: Mental health and physical rehabilitation of trafficked West African boys and girls,” Wellcome History 38 (Summer): 2-3
2004 “Refreshing Historical Accounts of Human Rights in Africa,” Oriental Anthropologist 4: 34-59
2003 “La Révolte des Femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931-33,” African Studies Review 46: 43-67
2001 “Language Between Powers, Power Between Languages: Further discussion of education and policy in Togoland under the French Mandate, 1919-1945,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 163-164, XLI: 517-539
2001 “Réflexions sur les recherches sur les enjeux linguistiques des Ewé,” Traverses: Subjectivité, Singularités, Cultures, 3: 223-230
2000 “Most Obedient Servants: The Politics of Language in German Colonial Togo,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 159, XL: 489-524
2017 “Historicizing as a Legal Trope of Jeopardy in Asylum Narratives and Expert Testimony of Gendered Violence,” in Jacqueline Knörr, William P. Murphy, Anne-Sophie Helger, and Christian Kordt Højbjerg (eds.), Politics and Policies in Upper Guinea Coast Societies: Change and Continuity (New York: Palgrave), forthcoming
2017 “Asylum and the ‘Forced Marriage’ Paradox: Petitions, Translation, and Courts as Institutional Perpetrators of Gender Violence,” in Joel Quirk and Annie Bunting (eds.), Modern Slavery and Global Change (University of British Columbia Press), forthcoming
2017 “Statelessness-in-Question: Expert Testimony and the Evidentiary Burdens of Statelessness.” In Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness, Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens (eds.)
2016 “Resisting Patriarchy, Contesting Homophobia: Expert Testimony and the Construction of African Forced Marriage Asylum Claims,” with Charlotte Walker-Said, in Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa, edited by A. Bunting, B. N. Lawrance, and R. L. Roberts (Athens: Ohio University Press), 199-224.
2016 “‘Something Old, Something New’: Conceptualizing Forced Marriage in Africa,” with Annie Bunting and Richard L. Roberts, in Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa, edited by A. Bunting, B. N. Lawrance, and R. L. Roberts (Athens: Ohio University Press), 1-40.
2015 “Law, Expertise, and Protean Ideas about African Migrants,” with Iris Berger, Tricia Hepner Redeker, Joanna Tague, and Meredith Terretta, in African Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press), 1-37
2015 “From ‘Health Tourism’ to ‘Atrocious Barbarism’: Contextualizing African Migrant Choice, Expertise, and Medical Humanitarian Practice,” in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Galya Ruffer (eds.), Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 221-244
2015 “Witness to the Persecution? Expertise, Testimony, and Consistency in Asylum Adjudication,” with Galya Ruffer, in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Galya Ruffer (eds.), Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1-24
2012 “Contextualizing Trafficking in Women and Children in Africa,” with Richard L. Roberts, in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experiences of Women and Children in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press), 1-25.
2012 “Documenting Child Slavery with Personal Testimony: The Origins of Anti-Trafficking NGOs and Contemporary Neo-Abolitionism,” in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), Trafficking in Slavery’s Wake: Law and the Experiences of Women and Children in Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press), 163-82.
2006 “African Intermediaries and the ‘Bargain of Collaboration’,” with Emily L. Osborn and Richard L. Roberts, in Benjamin N. Lawrance, Emily L. Osborn, and Richard L. Roberts (eds.), Intermediaries, Interpreters and Clerks: African Employees and the Making of Colonial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), 3-34
CHAPTERS, RESEARCH NOTES, ESSAYS, & ARTICLES
2016 “The Impact of Framing Migration as Crisis,” http://southwritlarge.com/articles/the-impact-of-framing-migration-as-crisis/
2016 “To know where you come from; that is divine: Three New Documentary Films about the African Slave Experience.” Film Review Essay, Slavery and Abolition, 36, Vol. 4: 738-746
2016 Foreword, Child Migration in Africa, edited by Marie Rodet and Elodie Razy (London: James Currey/Boydell and Brewer)
2014 “Nigeria’s Trafficking Situation in 2014: A Research Synthesis,” National Intelligence University, Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Research Note, 1-13
2013 “Chocolate Chiefs: Cocoa, Borders, and Colonialism in the Togoland Mandates, 1920-1945,” in T. Nicoué Lodjo Gayibor (ed.), Peuples et Frontières dans l’Espace Ouest-Africain Collections Patrimoines, No.15 (Lomé: Presse de l’Université de Lomé), 241-287.
2012 “Foodways, ‘Foodism,’ or Foodscapes? Navigating the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides,” with Carolyn de la Peña, in Benjamin N. Lawrance and Carolyn de la Peña (eds.), Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History (Routledge/Taylor Francis), 1-19
2005 “France in Tropical Africa,” with Richard L. Roberts, in Dinah Shelton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Macmillan, Gale Group), 383-386. The New York Public Library honored the Encyclopedia as a “Best in Reference” work in 2006
2005 “Le Togo Britannique de 1920 à 1957,” in Nicoué L. Gayibor (ed.), Histoire des Togolais: Vol. II, de 1880 à 1960 (Paris: Karthala), 283-305
2005 “The History of the Ewe Language and Ewe Language Education,” in Benjamin N. Lawrance (ed.), The Ewe of Togo and Benin (Accra, Ghana: Woeli Publishing Services), 215-28
2004 “Bodies of Water: Expressions of the Anlo-Ewe Past and Present,” Review of Emmanuel Akyeampong Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c1850 to Recent Times, Kathyrn Linn Geurts, Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community, and Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana, in Anthropological Quarterly 76: 361-368
Encyclopedia Articles
2011 “Trokosi,” in Junius P. Rodriguez (ed.), Slavery in the Modern World: A History of Political, Social, and Economic Oppression (ABC-CLIO), 529-31
2008 “Togo: Geography and Economy,” “Togo: Society and Cultures,” and “Togo: History and Politics,” in John Middleton and Joseph C. Miller (eds.), New Encyclopedia of Africa, 2nd Ed. (Thompson/Gale), 60-62, 62-65, 65-67
2006 “Benin,” and “Togo,” N. Schlager and J. Wiesblatt (eds.), World Encyclopedia of Political Systems and Parties, 4th Edition, (New York: Facts on File), 132-135, 1349-1352
2005 “Sylvanus Olympio,” and “Africa in World History” in Kevin Shillington (ed.), Encyclopedia of African History (London: Fitzroy Dearborn), 1177-8, 1666-70
2005 “Togo” and “Lomé,” World Book Encyclopedia, 309-311, 427
2004 “Ewe” and “Togo” in C. Skutsch (ed.), Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities (New York: Routledge), 449-50, 1206-7
2002 “Togo,” in Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Dickson Eyoh (eds.), Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century African History, (London: Routledge), 561-63
2002 “Lomé, Togo” in C. Ember & M. Ember (ed.), Encyclopedia of Urban Cultures, Vol. 3, Human Relations Area Files (New Haven: Macmillan), 56-63
2001 “Togo,” in C. Ember & M. Ember (ed.), Countries and their Cultures, Human Relations Area Files (New Haven: Macmillan), 2218-2226
2001 “Africa: Oral Life Stories,” in M. Jolly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Life Writing, (London: Fitzroy Dearborn), 15-17
1999 “République du Bénin,” in D.A. Kaple (ed.), World Encyclopedia of Political Systems and Parties, 3rd Edition (New York: Facts on File), 109-11
Book Reviews
2017 Meera Venkatachalam, Slavery, Memory, and Religion in Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850-Present, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) International Journal of African Historical Studies, forthcoming
2016 Jonathan M. Bryant, Dark Places of the Earth: The Voyage of the Slave Ship Antelope (New York: Liveright/Norton, 2015) The Journal of American History, forthcoming
2016 Richard Allen, European Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean 1500-1850 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014), Comparative Studies in Society and History, forthcoming
2012 Sandra E. Greene, West African Narratives of Slavery: Texts from Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth Century Ghana (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), Journal of Biography, Vol. 35, Issue 3 (Summer): 519-22
2011 Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton University Press, 2010). H-Africa, H-Net Reviews, August 2011. https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30780
2010 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (Norton & Co, 2007). Journal of World History 21.2: 339-41
2008 Edna G. Bay and Donald L. Donham, (eds.), States of Violence: Politics, Youth, and Memory in Contemporary Africa (University of Virginia Press, 2006). International Journal of African Historical Studies 40.2: 327-29
2007 Adam Jones and Peter Sebald, An African Family Archive: The Lawson of Little Popo/Aneho (Togo) 1841-1938, (Oxford University Press/British Academy), Fontes Historiae Africanae New Series No. 7. Africa: Bulletin of the International African Institute 77: 620-1
2007 Gareth Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807-1956 (University of Rochester Press, 2005). Africa: Bulletin of the International African Institute 77: 300-2
2007 Stephan F. Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2005). African Studies Review 50.1: 185-6
2006 Roger Gocking, History of Ghana (Greenwood, 2005). Africa 76: 609-10
2004 Ulrike Schuerkens, Du Togo allemand aux Togo et Ghana indépendants: changement social sous régime colonial (l’Harmattan, 2001). Cahiers d’Études Africaines 175: 717-8
2003 Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times (Ohio University Press, 2001). Africa 73: 309-10
2003 Paul Nugent, Smugglers, Secessionists, and Loyal Citizens on the Ghana-Togo Frontier (Ohio University Press, 2003). African Studies Review 46: 136-8
2003 Toyin Falola (ed.), Ghana in Africa and the World: Essays in Honor of Adu Boahen (Africa World Press, 2002). International Journal of African Historical Studies 36: 205-6
2002 Jan Jansen, The Griot’s Craft: An Essay on Oral Tradition and Diplomacy, Vol. 8: Forschung zur Sprachen und Kulturen Afrikas (LIT Verlag, 2000). Anthropological Quarterly 75: 423-27
2001 Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds.), Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies of African Homosexualities, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Sexuality and Culture Vol. 5, Issue 2: 99-102
2000 Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1999). Cahiers d’Études Africaines 160