On Apr 2, 12:32 am, Toyin Falola <toyin.fal...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote:
> DISTINGUISHED AFRICANIST AWARD, 2012
> Dr Kenneth is the 2012 recipient of the
> Distinguished Africanist Award at the Africa
> Annual Conference, University of Texas at Austin.
> This is an award dedicated to life time service
> and enormous contributions to the discipline in
> academic and practical manners.
>
> Kenneth Harrow is Distinguished Professor
> of English at Michigan State University. He
> received a BS from M.I.T., an MA in English from
> NYU, and a PhD in Comparative Literature, also
> from NYU. His dissertation was a comparative
> study of the works of Albert Camus (French
> philosopher and author), Ignazio Silone (Italian
> author and politician), and Arthur Miller
> (American playwright). Dr. Harrow's current work
> focuses on African cinema and literature and
> Diaspora and Postcolonial Studies.
> Dr. Harrow began his career at Michigan
> State, where he served as a lecturer for three
> years before being hired in 1970 as Assistant
> Professor in the Department of Humanities. As a
> young scholar, he received the Younger Humanist
> Fellowship from the National Endowment for the
> Humanities (NEH), which enabled him to travel to
> France and North Africa to investigate the
> relationship between the work of Albert Camus and
> the Francophone literature of the Maghreb.
> In these early years, Dr. Harrow also
> wrote plays and short stories. His one-act play
> Death to the Brother was produced at the Omni
> Theatre Club in New York City in 1972. Another
> play, In for Life, won the Boarshead Theatre
> Competition in Lansing, Michigan, in 1977.
> Boarshead is a professional theatre company
> "nationally acclaimed for producing new plays and
> its top-quality productions."
> Dr. Harrow was awarded the first of his
> three Fulbright grants in 1977. He taught as a
> Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature
> at the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, from 1977
> to 1979.
> Dr. Harrow returned to Africa for a year
> in 1982 as a Senior Fulbright Researcher in
> Dakar, Senegal, where he also guest-lectured at
> the University of Dakar and the University of
> Ouagadougou, Upper Volta, Burkina Faso.
> In 1986 Dr. Harrow co-convened the
> African Literature Association conference held at
> Michigan State. The theme that year was "Critical
> Theory and Political Commitment," and the
> conference featured notable speakers from
> different parts of the world. Dr. Harrow helped
> secure additional funding to support the
> conference, in the form of two grants from the
> Michigan Council for the Humanities and one from
> the Michigan Council for the Arts.
> In addition to serving two, three-year
> terms on the Executive Council of the African
> Literature Association, Dr. Harrow also served as
> the association's Vice President in 1987-8 and as
> President in 1988-9.
> In 1989, after teaching for 19 years as a
> professor in the Department of Humanities and
> undertaking a year-long joint appointment with
> the Humanities and English departments, Dr.
> Harrow was appointed Professor in the Department
> of English, where today he is Distinguished
> Professor of English. During that same year he
> also returned to Senegal and spent time teaching
> at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (formerly
> University of Dakar), in conjunction with an
> MSU-Université Cheikh Anta Diop linkage grant
> sponsored by what was then called the United
> States Information Agency, or USIA.
> In 1994, Dr. Harrow published his first
> book, Thresholds of Change in African Literature.
> Three years later, in 1997, Dr. Harrow again
> convened a major African Studies conference, this
> time under the auspices of the African Literature
> Association Conference, held at Michigan State
> University. The theme was African cinema, and the
> conference featured a dozen African filmmakers.
> Dr. Harrow's second book, Less Than One
> and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women's
> Writing, was published in 2002, toward the end of
> his two-year tenure as Director of the Graduate
> Program in Comparative Literature.
> Dr. Harrow's third and most recent
> Fulbright enabled him to serve as Fulbright
> Senior Lecturer at Université Cheikh Anta Diop,
> Dakar, Senegal from 2005 to 2006. While in Dakar,
> he organized an African and African American Film
> Series in February 2006 and again that summer. A
> year later, his third book, Postcolonial African
> Cinema: From Political Engagement to
> Postmodernism, was published by Indiana
> University Press. His latest work Trash! A Study
> of African Cinema Viewed from Below, will be
> published by Indiana University Press in 2012.
> In addition to his four books, Dr. Harrow
> has edited numerous collections on such topics as
> Islam and African literature, African cinema, and
> women in African literature and cinema, including
> special issues of Research in African Literatures
> and Women in African Cinema. He has served on the
> editorial boards of the Journal of Maghrebi
> Studies, Research in African Literatures,
> Critical Arts, The Global South, and Proteus: A
> Journal of Ideas, and served as Associate Editor
> of Research in African Literatures from
> 1992-1993.
> Dr. Harrow has published more than 50
> articles on topics ranging from African film,
> African literature, the situation of women in the
> Maghreb, and a dozen chapters. He has contributed
> several entries on African cinema, African
> literature, and Islam to dictionaries and
> encyclopedias, and is the Associate Editor of The
> Encyclopedia of African Literature. One
> especially notable project was his
> co-coordination (with Marjorie Winters) of a
> "project to review and supplement the entire
> holdings on African writers in the macropedia of
> the Encyclopedia Britannica."
> Dr. Harrow plays an active role in the
> university community at Michigan State, and has
> served on many committees over the years. He has
> also made a significant contribution to his
> larger community, both locally and worldwide, by
> serving as a reviewer of African literature for
> the PMLA, World Literature Today, and Africana
> Journal, as well as for granting agencies such as
> the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
> Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, he is a
> member of Amnesty International's US Coordinating
> Committee for Central Africa, working as the
> country coordinator for Burundi, Rwanda, and the
> support coordinator for the Democratic Republic
> of Congo.
> Dr. Harrow has been awarded several
> research grants from Michigan State over the
> years, and he has also been honored with the
> Distinguished Member Award. The African
> Literature Association honored him with their
> first Distinguished Member Award.
>
> --
> Toyin Falola
> Department of History
> The University of Texas at Austin
> 1 University Station
> Austin, TX 78712-0220
> USA
> 512 475 7224
> 512 475 7222 (fax)http://www.toyinfalola.com/www.utexas.edu/conferences/africahttp://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairshttp://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
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