Faculty and Staff
Jean Allman
Professor of History
Jean Allman’s area of specialization is West Africa, with an ongoing research focus on Ghana. Her first book, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Wisconsin, 1993), explored the social history of Asante politics in the 1950s. Her recent work focuses on gender and colonialism in West Africa and has appeared in Gender and History, the Journal of African History, History Workshop Journal, Africa and several edited anthologies. In 2000, she published withVictoria Tashjian, I Will Not Eat Stone: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (Heinemann, 2000), and in 2002 co-editedand introduced with Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Musisi, an anthology on Women in African Colonial Histories (Indiana University Press). Her edited collection, Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress appeared from Indiana University Press in 2004. Allman’s current research is on migration, “traditional” belief systems and modernity and has been supported by the ACLS, the NEH, the SSRC and Fulbright-Hays. With John Parker, she published in 2005 Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (Indiana). Allman currently serves as Director of the Center for African Studies and co-edits, with Allen Isaacman, the New African Histories book series at Ohio University Press. She and UIUC colleague Antoinette Burton co-edit the Journal of Women’s History. Allman earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1987 and came to the University of Illinois in spring, 2001 from the University of Minnesota.