Center for African Studies

Barbara Cooper
Associate Professor of History
Director Center for African Studies

bacooper@rci.rutgers.edu

VD 003
732-932-6718

Center for African Studies
Beck Hall, Room 202
99 Avenue E
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045
(732) 445-1194

At Rutgers Since 2001

Ph.D. Boston University
B.A. St. John’s College (Annapolis)

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

Professor Cooper is interested in the intersections between culture and political economy, focusing upon gender, religion, and family life. Drawing upon archival sources as well as oral interviews in the Hausa speaking region of Niger in the west African Sahel, her publications have addressed female labor and slavery, gift exchange as social discourse, oral genres and the oral re-performance of pilgrimage, movement and the construction of gender, and the negotiation of a shifting political economy through the re-definition of marriage. She is currently writing a book on the history of a minority Evangelical Protestant community in majority Muslim Niger that engages with the history of U.S. interventions in Africa, the problem of religious violence, the relationships between religion, secularism, and modernity, and the construction of gender in Christianity and Islam.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT:

Undergraduate:

01:508:220 Ancient Africa

01:508:224 Women and Gender in African History

01:508:326 Islam in African History

01:508:429 Research in African Historical Studies

Graduate:
16:510:625. Colloquium in African History

CENTER FOR AFRICAN STUDIES:
Please see the Center for African Studies website for information on the Certificate Program in African Studies and current courses: http://ruafrica.rutgers.edu/students/graduate/index.html

PUBLICATIONS:

Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel. Indiana University Press, 2006.

Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989. Portsmouth: Heinemann (Social History of Africa Series), 1997.

“The Strength in the Song: Muslim Personhood, Audible Capital and Hausa Women’s Performance of the Hajj,” in Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives, edited by Dorothy Hodgson, Palgrave, 2001, 79-104.

“Le genre sexuel, le mouvement et l’histoire: transformations sociales et spatiales au XXè siècle à Maradi au Niger,” translated by Denise Ganderton and reprinted in Géographies Anglo-Saxonnes: Tendances contemporaines, edited by Jean-Francois Staszak et al, Belin, 2001, 80-94.

AWARDS:

Finalist for the African Studies Association 1998 Herskovits Award for
the best book published in 1997 in African Studies for Marriage in
Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900-1989.
Portsmouth: Heinemann (Social History of Africa Series), 1997.

Nominated by the Journal of African History for the Berkshire Conference
on Women annual article prize for “Women’s worth and wedding gift
exchange in Maradi, Niger, 1907-1989.”

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS: