Associate Director: Butch Ware
Butch Ware (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2004) specializes in West African history. His research interests include Islam, social history, education, slavery, and race. His first book project, tentatively entitled “Knowledge, Faith, and Power: A History of Qur’ān Schooling in Senegambia,” grows out of his doctoral dissertation research and interrogates the role of “traditional” Islamic education in shaping Muslim identity and Islamic society. The book examines and documents the history of a largely ignored Islamic educational ethic of personalized, internalized, and embodied instruction as it has shaped and been shaped by a West African Muslim society. Ware is also pursuing new research on the history of slavery, race, and religion in Islamic Africa, the first fruits of which will appear as “Slavery in Islamic Africa, 1400-1800,” in The Cambridge World History of Slavery Vol III (Cambridge, 2007). Ware has a strong interest in exploring the interwoven histories of continental and Diaspora Africans in his teaching and research and has taught courses on African-American history and the early-modern Black Atlantic World.
