LibGuides: The Living Sahara: Workshop: The Living Sahara

Welcome

Welcome to "The Living Sahara" workshop!

Please visit the workshop page to learn more.

Keynote Address

Souleymane Bachir Diagne,

“On the Trans-Saharan Routes, Disrupting Area Studies"

Abstract: It is important to emphasize that the Sahara Desert was never a wall separating two worlds, as it was crossed by roads linking the southern regions of the continent to the global world of Islam. These roads played a crucial role in the creation of the important intellectual centers that developed in West Africa - Timbuktu being the most famous of them today. The constitution of what will be called the Islamic library will be studied, with a special focus on the most emblematic figure of the West African scholarly tradition: Ahmed Baba al Timbuktī.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor in the departments of French and of Philosophy and the Director of the Institute of African Studies at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, African Philosophy and Literature.

Speakers

Debora Heard,

"Teaching Ancient Saharan and Nile Valley Populations"

Abstract: This presentation will explore the ways that Mesolithic and Neolithic populations in the Sahara and Nile Valley came to understand their existence within the context of space and time, developing structures, objects, and technology that allowed them to integrate themselves into the order of nature.

Debora Heard is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology specializing in the archaeology and history of ancient Nubia at the University of Chicago, where she has also studied ancient Egyptian history and language in the Department of Egyptology. Situating her research at the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, Egyptology, Nubian Studies, African Studies, and Africana Studies, her dissertation engages in a regional and temporal analysis of the inscriptions and iconography of the Upper Nubian Kushite temples dedicated to the gods Amun and Apedemak.

Shayla Monroe,

“Teaching Human-Animal Environments"

Shayla Monroe received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), in 2021. She specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, the archaeology of African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzes the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Askut (c. 1850 – 1550 BC) and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists. Monroe earned her M.A. in Anthropology from UCSB in 2015. Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3^rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, also in northern Sudan. Monroe began her career at Howard University, where she earned degrees in Anthropology and English (2012). She also spent two seasons (2010 and 2011) working at L’Hermitage plantation (also known as the Best Farm Slave Village) with the National Park Service in Frederick, Maryland.

Dr. Monroe’s present research focuses on mapping social networks and relationships among pastoralists in the Middle Nile Valley and adjacent regions from the Late Neolithic to the end of the Bronze Age.

Find more information on her website.

Liz Matsushita,

“Music as Teaching Method for Trans-Saharan Histories”

Abstract: In this talk, Dr. Matsushita will give an informative lecture on the history and contemporary practice of the musical genres of desert blues (also known as Tuareg or Saharan blues) and Gnawa, both of which have become extremely popular in the local and global contexts. Specifically, we will discuss how the histories of these musics are rooted in the migrations, connectivity, and racial and ethnic diversity that characterize the Saharan region, and as such make particularly effective teaching tools for those seeking to provide a more complex, robust engagement with Africa for their students. The lecture will be followed by a teaching exercise, which will aim to give educators, regardless of their level of musical experience or training, suggestions on how to use music as a teaching tool in the classroom.

Liz Matsushita is a historian of modern North Africa and the Middle East, with a special interest in race and ethnicity, colonialism, nationalism, anticolonial resistance, knowledge production, and music. A former Fulbright fellow in Morocco, her current research examines the history of music and musicology in colonial and postcolonial Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, and the ways in which music served as a political idiom that shaped understandings of race and power. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches classes on music in the Middle East and North Africa and trans-Saharan history.

Learn more about her work here.