Notes on Contributors
is senior researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in African Linguistics from the University of Leipzig (Germany) and her habilitation degree in African Studies from the University of Vienna (Austria). Bromber has extensively published on Swahili language as a socio-historical historical phenomenon, on translocality as conceptual tool, and on perceptions and experiences of the World Wars from a non-European perspective. Her current focus of research revolved around the social history of physical culture in late Imperial Ethiopia and in the Gulf States.
Francesca Declich
is associate professor at the Università di Urbino Carlo Bo. She has been a researcher at the Refugee Studies Centre of the University of Oxford, the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden, the Program of African Studies (PAS) of Northwestern University and the Center for African Studies (CAS) at Stanford University. She has acquired a wide experience of the Western Indian Ocean region by carrying out research projects in Somalia, Tanzania and Mozambique as well as in the US, with Somali refugees. She has published numerous articles and books.
Rebecca Gearhart Mafazy
is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Sociology & Anthropology of Illinois Wesleyan University. Her research over the past thirty years has focused on the peoples of the northern Kenya coast, and on the peoples who live in the Lamu archipelago in particular. In addition to studying Swahili expressive arts broadly defined, I am interested in highlighting various kinds of injustice at work in coastal Kenya: healthcare disparity, the impact of poverty on the lives of women and children, and the omission of people’s own histories. Documenting the experiences and highlighting the contributions of otherwise overlooked and misunderstood communities in order to add new voices that challenge the dominant script are goals that have inspired my latest research and writing projects.
Linda Giles
is an Independent Scholar. Dr. Giles is currently retired, after teaching Anthropology at Illinois State University and later teaching as an adjunct at Illinois
Ida Hadjivayanis
has a Ph.D. (2010) in Norms of Swahili Translation, and is Senior Lector at SOAS, University of London. She has published articles on translation and the Zanzibari migration in Britain. She has also translated Alice’s adventures in Wonderland into Swahili Alisi ndani ya nchi ya ajabu (Evertype, 2015).
Mohamed Kassim
teaches at Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, Toronto, Canada. His PhD thesis in history at York University (2006) is entitled Colonial resistance and local transmission of Islamic knowledge in the Benadir Coast in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He edited together with Alessandra Vianello Servants of the Sharia. The Civil Register of the Qadis’ Court of Brava 1893–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2006). He is currently working on a source publication on the didactic religious poetry of Brava in Chimiini in collaboration with Lidwien Kapteijns and Alessandra Vianello.
Kjersti Larsen
is Professor at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics and Classical Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo where she has also been Head of Department (2003–2006). Larsen has been a visiting scholar at Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford; Centre d’Études Africaines, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM), Leiden University. She conducts research in Muslim societies in East Africa; at the Swahili Coast, particularly on Zanzibar (1984-present) and in Northern Sudan, mostly in the Bayoda desert (1997–2009). Larsen has several international publications, including the monograph Where Humans and Spirits Meet: the Politics of Rituals and Identified Spirits in Zanzibar, Oxford: Berghahn (2008)
Connectivity – Configurations of Belonging, to be published at Peter Lang, Oxford.
Her main research interests include ritual and performance; knowledge, morality and gender; everyday-life politics, collective memory and social change; identity, mobility and connectivity in African societies and the Indian Ocean Region.
Maria Suriano
is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She specializes in Eastern African social and intellectual history, and on Swahili language and culture. Her research interests range from past and present popular culture in urban Tanzania to the historical connections between Africa and the western Indian Ocean and the localisation of foreign cultural forms and items.
Mohamed Ahmed Saleh
was born in Zanzibar. He holds a master’s degree and a diplôme d’études approfondies in social anthropology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (E.H.E.S.S) and is currently completing his doctoral research in Paris. As an independent scholar, he is a member of the Société des Africanistes and has done fieldwork on fishing communities in Zanzibar as well as on identity, systems of representation and marriage among Swahilis living in East Africa, the Comoros, Gulf Countries, Oman and Europe. He has also worked with French public television (France 3, Thalassa), producing documentary films on the Caribbean, Kenya and Zanzibar. He has written a number of publications on Zanzibar and the Swahili culture.
Gerard van de Bruinhorst
is a bibliographer and social anthropologist affiliated to the African Studies Centre Leiden. He published on Swahili Quran translations and Islamic rituals in East Africa.
Alessandra Vianello
is an independent scholar and researcher, affiliated with the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She lived and worked in Somalia from 1970 to 1990 and has specialized in the history and culture of Brava, on the Benadir coast of Somalia, especially also Brava’s Bantu language called Chimiini or Chimbalazi. She edited (with Mohamed Kassim) Servants of the Sharia: The Civil Register of the Qadis’