Olufemi (Femi) Vaughan

Olufemi (Femi) Vaughan was raised in Ibadan, Nigeria, and received his D.Phil. in politics from Oxford University. He is the Alfred Sargent Lee & Mary Lee Professor and Chair of Black Studies at Amherst College. Vaughan’s scholarship interrogates major themes in African studies, notably state-society relations in Africa, religion and state formation in Africa, and globalization and migration in Africa. He is the author of four books and editor/co-editor of eleven volumes, including Religion and the Making of Nigeria (Duke Press, 2016), winner of the Nigerian Studies Association Prize; Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics (Rochester Press, 2000), winner of the Cecil Currey Prize, Association of Global Studies; and Oxford Encyclopedia of African Historiography: Methods and Sources (editor-in-chief, Thomas Spear, Oxford Press, 2019), winner of the Waldo Leland Prize, American Historical Association. Professor Vaughan is also the author of about eighty scholarly articles and reviews. His research has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Vaughan was Professor of Africana Studies & History at Stony Brook University, and the Geoffrey Canada Professor of Africana Studies & History at Bowdoin College.