Locksley Edmondson, of Jamaican origin, Professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University since 1983 (and former Director, 1991-96), is a political scientist with specializations in international relations and international/comparative race relations. He earned a Bachelor of Social Sciences (Hons.) in England (Birmingham University) and a PhD in Canada (Queen’s University).
He has taught at other United States universities (Denver & Southern Illinois University at Carbondale), and elsewhere at University of Waterloo (Canada); Makerere University (Uganda); and University of the West Indies (where he served as Campus and University Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, 1976-80).
His involvement in professional scholarly associations include: African Studies Association of the West Indies (former President); International Congress of African Studies (former International Vice-President and Bureau member); Caribbean Studies Association (former President); and New York African Studies Association (former President).
Illustrative of his Global African research interests are these publications: “Black America as a Mobilizing Diaspora,” in Modern Diasporas in International Politics (London, 1986); “Pan Africanism and the International System Past and Present” in Pan-Africanism: New Directions in Strategy (Washington, DC, 1986); “Africa and the Developing Regions” in UNESCO General History of Africa, Vol. VIII (Paris, 1993); “The Caribbean Diaspora/Caribbean Homeland Dialectic and the Global Caribbean” in Governance in the Age of Globalisation: Caribbean Perspectives (Kingston, 2003); “The Invention of Racism and the Dynamics of Race: The Caribbean and Global Africa” in Racism and the Global African Experience (forthcoming from the Center for Advanced Studies of African Society, Cape Town, South Africa).

Sandra Greene is professor of African History and Chair of the History Department at Cornell University. She holds a doctorate in African History and her research and teaching have focused on West African history, particularly of the Anlo-Ewe in Ghana, gender, colonialism, the geographies of religious change, and the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade. She has published numerous articles on the political and cultural history of the Anlo-Ewe of Ghana, and is the author of Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast (1996) and Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana (2002). Professor Greene was the Director of the 2005 WARA Summer Faculty Institute, The Changing Dynamics of Memory and Community in West African History and Anthropology. Professor Greene served as president of the African Studies Association (1997-98), as a board member of Ubuntu 2000-African Festival of the Arts (1998-2000), and a board member of the National Summit on Africa. She has also served as an editorial board member of the International Journal of African Historical Studies and of the Cambridge University Press' Perspectives on the African Past series.

Robert L. Harris, Jr. is Professor of African American history in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University and Vice Provost for Diversity and Faculty Development. He is the author of more than 60 articles and chapters in academic journals and books. He is past president of the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History and former Director of the Africana Studies and Research Center. His research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. With Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, he recently published The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939.

Biddy Martin is the president's first deputy officer and reports to the president as the chief educational officer and chief operating officer of the university. She is responsible for overseeing all academic programs, with the exception of those programs reporting to the provost for medical affairs in New York City.
Provost Martin completed her Ph.D. degree in German Literature in 1985 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been on the faculty at Cornell since 1984. In 1991, she was promoted to associate professor in the Department of German Studies with a joint appointment in the Women's Studies Program. She served as chair of the Department of German Studies from 1994 to 1997, and in 1997 was promoted to full professor in the department. She also served as associate director of the Women's Studies Program in 1993-94. In 1996, she was appointed senior associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences, and effective July 1, 2000, was appointed provost of Cornell University. She has served on several committees of the Institute for German Cultural Studies, the Women's Studies Program, and the field of Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay Studies. Her publications include Woman and Modernity: The (Life) Styles of Lou Andreas-Salome, Cornell University Press, 1991, and Femininity Played Straight, Routledge Press, 1996.

Salem Mekuria is Associate Professor of Art at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and an independent film producer, writer, director, originally from Ethiopia. For a number of years, she worked with NOVA, Public Television's premier science documentary series, a production of WGBH-TV, and with numerous international film productions focusing on issues of African women and development. Her work-in-progress includes a feature film screenplay and a video installation project for the Ethiopian millennium celebration in 2007. Her films have been broadcast internationally and have screened at venues all over the world.
Professor Mekuria is the recipient of: a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2005–06); Fulbright Scholar Research Fellowship (2003–04); New England Media Fellowship (2001); the Rockefeller Foundation's Intercultural Media Fellowship (1995); Lila Wallace Reader's Digest International Artists Residency Fellowship (1993); a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, Harvard University (1990–92); and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award (1991).
In 2003, Professor Mekuria participated in the 50th Venice Biennale in Italy, a major bi-annual international art exhibition, with her presentation, RUPTURES: A Many-Sided Story. Written, produced, and directed by Professor Mekuria, RUPTURES is a triptych video installation charting one century of major events in Ethiopian history.

Mwalimu Abdul Nanji was born in Tanzania, East Africa and came to the U.S. to further his education, attending SUNY and Howard University, majoring in African Studies. He started teaching Kiswahili (Swahili) Language, Literature and Culture at Cornell in 1977. Before joining the Cornell faculty, he taught at SUNY at New Paltz, NYC Technical College, Hunter College, and Columbia University. His research and interests are in central and southern African languages and literature, languages of Africans in the diaspora, and Pan-Africanism. He enjoys traditional and contemporary African music, jazz, blues, caribbean music, salsa music, hip hop, and rap.

Tekeste Negash is Associate Prof. History Department Uppsala, Senior lecturer Falun, Dalarna University Consultant and Prof. Swedish University for Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1987 at Department of History at Uppsala University with a doctoral thesis on Italian colonialism in Eritrea. From 1988 until 1998, he did some research on three rather distinct areas, namely, political history, educational policy studies and the evolution of land tenure systems in the Horn of Africa. From 1998 to the present he has been studying democracy in Africa, National building, contemporary war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, european aid and a critical role of NGO and development studies His main research projects include: the former Italian East African Empire and its archives, the local and the external in Ethiopian social and political history from 1900 to 2000, international NGOs and the growing marginalisation of Africa, the global landscape of natural resource management and rural development from a local perspective, and the Democratic Goal of Education and Information Overload: Civic Education in European Secondary Schools.

James Turner is the founder of the Africana Studies and Research Center--founded 1969--and a professor of African and African American Politics and Social Policy at Cornell. He also organized Cornell's Council on African Studies, forming a basis for the university's interdisciplinary African Studies.
Turner initiated the term "Africana Studies" to conceptualize the comprehensive study of the African diaspora and the three primary global Black communities-Africa, North America, and the Caribbean. The Africana paradigm is now widely adopted by educational programs as the epistemology for the field of Black studies.
Turner was a founding member of TransAfrica, an African American lobbying organization. During the 1970s, he was a national organizer of the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee, which pressed the anti-apartheid campaign in the United States. In 1974, he served as chair of the North American delegation to the Sixth Pan African Congress, and in 1973, he co-chaired the International Congress of Africanists in Ethiopia.
As a Schomburg Research Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Turner conducted research on the political philosophy of Malcolm X that served as the basis for his work on the prize-winning PBS series Eyes on the Prize. The recipient of the Association of Black Sociologists' Award of Distinction, he has served as president of the African Heritage Studies Association and on the editorial boards of several leading Black Studies journals.
Turner holds a B.S. from Central Michigan University, an M.A. from Northwestern University, a certificate in African Studies from Northwestern's African Studies Center, and a Ph.D. from the Union Graduate School in Cincinnati.

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