Berkley Center

Erin Augis is associate professor and chair of sociology at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She has been researching Senegal's reformist Islamic movements and writing on female adherents' beliefs and practices for eighteen years. She also writes and speaks on the presence of militaristic Islamic movements in the Sahara. She recently published "Aïcha's Sounith Hair Salon: Friendship, Profit, and Resistance in Dakar" in Islamic Africa (December 2014), and she is completing a book manuscript on Senegal's reformist women.

Robert Baum is an associate professor in the Religion and African and African American Studies Program at Dartmouth College. His first book, Shrines of the Slave Trade:  Diola Religion and Society in Pre-Colonial Senegambia won an American Academy of Religion award for the best first book in the history of religions (2000). He has written numerous articles on the history of Diola religion, religious constructions of gender, indigenous religions and is currently completing a book on the history of Diola women's prophetic movements. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University, and upon graduation, he received a Watson Fellowship. He spent an entire year in a Diola village in southern Senegal, where he learned the language and began field research before beginning graduate school at Yale University. He returned to Senegal for two more years, and did archival work in London and Paris in preparation of his Ph.D. 

Laura Cochrane is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Cultural and Global Studies Program at Central Michigan University. Her ongoing research in Senegal places personal and social expressions of the arts and religious faiths within the contexts of West Africa’s environmental and economic concerns. This research focus includes studies of faith-based (Muslim and Christian) approaches to local economic development, and a project based on Sufi individuals’ life histories of faith. She has published in both anthropology and African studies journals, and is the author of Weaving through Islam in Senegal (2012), an ethnographic book on Senegalese weavers’ discourses about art and faith. She earned her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Julius E. Coles is the director of the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership. Before assuming this position, he was president of Africare from 2002-2009. He has also served as the director of Morehouse College’s Andrew Young Center for International Affairs from 1997-2002 and as the director of the director of Howard University’s Ralph J. Bunche International Affairs Center from 1994-1997. Most of Mr. Coles’ career of nearly thirty years in the Foreign Service has been spent as a senior official with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) where he retired with the rank of Career Minister. He received a B.A. from Morehouse College (1964) and a Masters of Public Affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (1966). He has appeared on CNN International, the Lerner News Hour, VOA TV and radio programs, and Radio Canada.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor in the Departments of French and Philosophy at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include history of philosophy, history of logic and mathematics, Islamic philosophy, and African philosophy and literature. His most recent publications include Islam and the Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal, Codesria (2010); L’élan vital dans la pensée de L.S. Senghor et de Mohamed Iqbal (2011); African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude (2011); Comment philosopher en Islam? (2013); and L'encre des savants: Reflexions sur la philosophie en Afrique (2013).

Mamadou Diouf is the Leitner Family Professor of African Studies and the director of Columbia University's Institute for African Studies. His research interests include urban, political, social and intellectual history in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Before joining the faculty at Columbia University, he was the Charles D. Moody Jr. Collegiate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Michigan, from 2000 to 2007. Before that, he was Head of the Research, Information, and Documentation Department of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and faculty member of the History Department of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. His publications include: Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal (ed. 2013), New Perspectives on Islam in Senegal: Conversion, Migration, Wealth, and Power (with Mara A. Leichtman, 2009). He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne.

Joanne Gleason is the associate director of the Population Council’s Reproductive Health program based in Washington, DC. Gleason has been working with the Council since 1989, initially managing the reproductive health and family planning program for Latin America and the Caribbean (1989-1993), and subsequently for sub-Saharan Africa (1994-1998). In these roles, she provided operational support for more than 200 projects, focusing on reproductive health, post-abortion care, family planning and contraception, breastfeeding, female genital cutting, and HIV and AIDS. From 1999 to 2008, Gleason served as administrator for the USAID-funded global Frontiers in Reproductive Health program, supporting Council efforts in LAC, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Gleason has worked and traveled extensively in more than 35 countries throughout the developing world. She holds a master's degree in international studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor's degree in foreign languages and international economics.

Philip Massey is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at Drexel University. His research focuses on health literacy as well as the role of expanding technologies on participatory health communication and health promotion, both domestically and globally. His research has investigated a social media intervention to build health literacy skills among low-income adolescents, diffusion patterns of internet use, and the multifaceted and interactive nature of health information seeking. Dr. Massey’s current work in global health examines health, media, computer, and digital literacies among Senegalese youth to better understand the health and information technology landscape in West Africa. Dr. Massey is also investigating communication patterns on social media platforms to inform evidence-based mHealth strategies that engage priority populations and build capacity to make informed decisions related to cancer prevention and control that promote and sustain health. He earned his M.P.H. and Ph.D. in Public Health with a concentration in health communication and global health from the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health.