Administrative Staff
Office Administration and Staff
Shelly joined African & African-American Studies in the Spring of 2019. She acts as office manager, scheduling officer, and point of contact for faculty, staff, and students. She attended Baker University as a student and graduated with a business degree.
Melissa assists in advising undergraduate students, majors and minors, for the African & African-American Studies program.
B.F.A. History of Art, University of Kansas
M.S.W. Social Welfare, University of Kansas
Faculty Administration
Shawn Leigh Alexander, who received his PhD from the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004, is a Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies, and the director of the Langston Hughes Center at the University of Kansas. His area of research concentration is African American social and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
Dr. Tony Bolden is a Professor of African and African-American Studies. His teaching and research interests include a broad spectrum of topics related to artistic expression in the African Diaspora, especially black music and literature. His book, Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (2004), is among the studies that prefigured the outpouring of scholarship devoted to black poetry today. Bolden has also figured prominently in funk studies. His new book, Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk, will be published in November. You can learn more about Bolden’s work on funk by visiting his website: www.phunkativity.org
Dr. Amal El Haimeur is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Arabic, and the coordinator of the Arabic language. She also serves as the director of the Arabic Summer Institute at Al-Akhawayn University in Morocco. She has extensive experience in foreign and second language instruction. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and specializes in Arabic as a heritage language, second language acquisition, and teaching Arabic as a foreign language. She is also interested in language contact in North Africa.
Liz MacGonagle is an African historian in the Departments of History and African & African American Studies. She is the Director of the Kansas African Studies Center (KASC). In her research, she crosses historical, geographical, and theoretical boundaries to link nation, culture, and ethnicity to processes of identity formation in African and Diasporan settings.
