Randal Jelks, PhD, is currently Associate Professor of American
                                        Studies with a joint appointment in African and African American
                                        Studies at the University of Kansas. Professor Jelks' childhood home
                                        is New Orleans. He lived there until he was fourteen, whereupon he
                                        resided in Chicago until college. Jelks is a graduate of the University
                                        of Michigan (BA in History), McCormick Theological Seminary
                                        (Masters of Divinity) and Michigan State University (Ph.D. in History). Previously he taught at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he also created a Semester in Ghana study program. Dr. Jelks was the 2006-2007 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and has published both scholarly and journalistic articles. His research and writing interests are in the area of African American Religious, Urban, and Civil Rights History. He has also published an award winning book titled African Americans in the Furniture City: the Civil Rights Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan (The University of Illinois Press, 2006). He is currently finishing a book on Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentor titled Benjamin Elijah Mays,: A Religious Rebel in the Jim Crow South: An Intellectual Biography to be published by the University of North Carolina Press.

                                     
                                        Yves Niyiragira is from Burundi, spent much of his life in a refugee
                                        camp in Tanzania, and now lives in Kenya. He received his
                                        undergraduate degree from Daystar University, Kenya and is
                                        currently in Nairobi working with Fahamu. Fahamu is a UK-based
                                        Africa-focused network for social justice which “has a vision of the
                                        world where people organize to emancipate themselves from all
                                        forms of oppression, recognize their social responsibilities, respect each other’s differences, and realize their full potential.” He spent last summer at the Oxford office but is now back in Nairobi where he works on their African Union Monitor Initiative.

 

 

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