Project Staff
Catherine Cymone Fourshey, Ph.D. / Principal Investigator
Catherine Cymone Fourshey is Associate Professor of History and International Relations at Bucknell University. Fourshey's published research focuses on histories of gender, agriculture, hospitality, migration, and the intersections of environment, economy, and politics in precolonial Tanzania. She has conducted research and published on gender in Africa, both in precolonial and colonial spaces. Fourshey recently completed a co-authored manuscript entitled Bantu Africa, which is being published by Oxford University Press. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Strangers, Immigrants and the Established: Hospitality as State Building Mechanism in Southwest Tanzania 300-1900 CE. Additionally, Fourshey has two newer research projects. The first is on the history of immigrants/refugees in Tanzania who are known in international aid and development circles as "the Bantu Somali." The second is a collaboration that examines precolonial gender ideologies and practices in central and eastern Africa. She has been a recipient of research grants and fellowships from the American Association of University Women, Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Notre Dame University. She is from Marin County, California, and holds a B.A. in political science and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history from UCLA.
Rhonda Gonzalez, Ph.D. / Principal Investigator
Rhonda M. Gonzales is Professor of African and African Diaspora History and Interim Dean for the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Gonzales is an American Council on Education Fellow. The National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, and The American Historical Association have supported her research on the history of women and their roles in sustaining and transforming communities through religion, medicine, and economy in precolonial Africa and in the African Diaspora in Mexico. Her publications include the co-authored Bantu Africa, 3500 BCE to Present, Societies, Religion, and Societies, Religion, and History: Central East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE, “No Friends in the Holy Office: Black and Mulata Women Healing Communities and Answering to the Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” among others. As a first-generation college graduate, she is passionate about envisioning and implementing programming and best practices to support the success of underrepresented minorities, first-generation, transition, low SES, and STEM students through to graduation. She is the PI for grants totaling more than $6 million that have funded her research and four student success programs at The University of Texas at San Antonio: First to Go and Graduate, the Roadrunner Transition Experience, Alamo Runners, and Math Matters.
Christine A. Saidi, Ph.D. / Principal Investigator
Christine A. Saidi is an Associate Professor of African and World History at Kutztown University. Saidi is the recipient of three prestigious Fulbright fellowships, a Social Science Research Council grant, a Woodrow Wilson Women's Studies grant, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. She was instrumental in establishing the Center for the Study of Gender in Africa at the African Studies Center at UCLA. She conducted research in Somalia and in the White Fathers' Archive, Rome, and later in Zambia and the COngo, as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. She has authored many scholarly articles and a book, coauthored a book, and is currently writing a coauthored textbook on the history of African women. She is from Los Angeles, California, and she received a B.A. in history, an M.A. in African Area Studies, and a Ph.D. in history from UCLA.
Troy E. Spier / Linguist Consultant
Biography