Edward A. Alpers

Edward A. Alpers has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1966, Ned also taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (1966-1968) and the Somali National University (1980) as a Fulbright Fellow. Previously, Ned served as both undergraduate and graduate vice chair of the department and he was Dean of Honors and Undergraduate Programs in the College of Letters & Science from 1985 to 1996. In 1994 he was elected President of the African Studies Association, the world’s largest scholarly association in his area of expertise.

Professor Alpers has published Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa, (1975) and a wide range of chapters in books and scholarly articles. He has co-edited with Pierre-Michel Fontaine, Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar (1982), with William Worger and Nancy Clark, Africa and the West: A Documentary history from the Slave Trade to Independence (2001), with Vijaya Teelock History, Memory, and Identity (2001), with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (2004), and with Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman, Slavery and Resistance in Asia and Africa (2005). He is currently writing a political economy of eastern Tanzania in the nineteenth century while at the same time engaged in a long-term study of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean. He will also be writing a text entitled The African Diaspora: A Global Perspective. Professor Alpers has served as chair or co-chair for fifty Ph.D. dissertations and presently chairs or co-chairs the committees of ten advanced graduate students.