Wendy Belcher
Princeton University, Comparative Literature, Faculty Member
- Comparative Literature, Languages and Linguistics, Philosophy, Art History, Critical Theory, Ethiopian Studies, and 24 moreEthiopian Orthodox Ge'ez literatures, East African history, Ethiopian History, Women's Studies, African History, Colonialism, Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Postcolonial and Anticolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Saints' Cults, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Christianity, Post-Colonialism, Colonialism and Imperialism, Classical Ethiopic, Ethiopic Literature, Marian Miracles, Christian Iconography, and Marian Iconography(Ethiopian Orthodox Ge'ez literatures, East African history, Ethiopian History, Women's Studies, African History, Colonialism, Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Postcolonial and Anticolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Saints' Cults, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, Ethiopian Christianity, Post-Colonialism, Colonialism and Imperialism, Classical Ethiopic, Ethiopic Literature, Marian Miracles, Christian Iconography, and Marian Iconography)edit
- Wendy Laura Belcher is a professor of medieval, early modern, and modern African literature with a joint appointment ... moreWendy Laura Belcher is a professor of medieval, early modern, and modern African literature with a joint appointment in the Princeton University departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies.(Wendy Laura Belcher is a professor of medieval, early modern, and modern African literature with a joint appointment in the Princeton University departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies.)edit
Princeton University Library DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS finding aid for its five collections of Ethiopic manuscripts. This finding aid was a collaborative effort with many authors, including Ephraim Isaac, Melaku... more
Princeton University Library DEPARTMENT OF RARE BOOKS AND SPECIAL COLLECTIONS finding aid for its five collections of Ethiopic manuscripts.
This finding aid was a collaborative effort with many authors, including Ephraim Isaac, Melaku Terefe, David Appleyard, Don Skemer, and Wendy Laura Belcher
First and second, codices and scrolls collected by the Princeton
University Library; third and fourth, codices, scrolls, and tablets collected in Ethiopia and titled the Garrett collection in honor of the patron Robert Garrett (1875-1961); and, finally, codices and scrolls collected by Bruce Willsie, Class of 1986.
Over the past century, the Princeton University Library has become one of the leading repositories for Ethiopic manuscripts in North America. Nearly all the manuscripts are in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The collection contains more than 600 objects, arranged in five collections. Holdings include codices (bound manuscripts) and magic scrolls (amulets), dating from the 17th to 20th centuries, chiefly written in Ge’ez, the sacred language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with small amounts of text in Amharic.
Included among Ethiopic bound manuscripts at Princeton are Bibles, Gospels, Psalters, homilies, liturgy, saints’ lives and miracles, theology, law, compilations on magic and divination, and other texts.
Pseudepigraphic manuscripts include the Book of Enoch, a pre-Christian text that was known in the New Testament and Patristic eras. Nearly all Ethiopic manuscripts are written in carbon-black ink on parchment. The quires are bound in an archaized style reminiscent of early Coptic Christian codices.
The rugged-looking manuscripts are sewn with unsupported link-stitch and then laced into roughhewn wooden boards. The boards are sometimes covered in leather and blind-tooled with simple
designs. Smaller manuscripts that had to be portable were placed in hand-fashioned leather carrying cases, which allowed them to be worn over the shoulder or hung up on pegs in walls.
Magic scrolls are also a product of Ethiopian Christianity as well as a reflection of popular religion and ritual practices. Their magical efficacy was based in large measure on a series of amuletic texts,
incantations, prayers, formulas, and invocations of divine names and helpful saints, offering protection against disease, death in childbirth, everyday misfortune, demonic possession, and evil spirits. Most
magic scrolls include the name of the person for whom they were produced. Contributing to their protective power were painted images of guardian angels with drawn swords, St. Susenyos slaying
Werzelya for the protection of mothers and infants, magic squares and eight-pointed stars, the net of
Solomon for capturing demons, and other figurative illustrations and designs. The magic scrolls were generally rolled up in small leather capsules, enabling them to be worn on the body. Occasionally,
we find fairly modern examples of these rolls sewn into the capsules so that they cannot be read. However, most were made to be opened and even hung on walls for prayer and protection.
This finding aid was a collaborative effort with many authors, including Ephraim Isaac, Melaku Terefe, David Appleyard, Don Skemer, and Wendy Laura Belcher
First and second, codices and scrolls collected by the Princeton
University Library; third and fourth, codices, scrolls, and tablets collected in Ethiopia and titled the Garrett collection in honor of the patron Robert Garrett (1875-1961); and, finally, codices and scrolls collected by Bruce Willsie, Class of 1986.
Over the past century, the Princeton University Library has become one of the leading repositories for Ethiopic manuscripts in North America. Nearly all the manuscripts are in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The collection contains more than 600 objects, arranged in five collections. Holdings include codices (bound manuscripts) and magic scrolls (amulets), dating from the 17th to 20th centuries, chiefly written in Ge’ez, the sacred language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with small amounts of text in Amharic.
Included among Ethiopic bound manuscripts at Princeton are Bibles, Gospels, Psalters, homilies, liturgy, saints’ lives and miracles, theology, law, compilations on magic and divination, and other texts.
Pseudepigraphic manuscripts include the Book of Enoch, a pre-Christian text that was known in the New Testament and Patristic eras. Nearly all Ethiopic manuscripts are written in carbon-black ink on parchment. The quires are bound in an archaized style reminiscent of early Coptic Christian codices.
The rugged-looking manuscripts are sewn with unsupported link-stitch and then laced into roughhewn wooden boards. The boards are sometimes covered in leather and blind-tooled with simple
designs. Smaller manuscripts that had to be portable were placed in hand-fashioned leather carrying cases, which allowed them to be worn over the shoulder or hung up on pegs in walls.
Magic scrolls are also a product of Ethiopian Christianity as well as a reflection of popular religion and ritual practices. Their magical efficacy was based in large measure on a series of amuletic texts,
incantations, prayers, formulas, and invocations of divine names and helpful saints, offering protection against disease, death in childbirth, everyday misfortune, demonic possession, and evil spirits. Most
magic scrolls include the name of the person for whom they were produced. Contributing to their protective power were painted images of guardian angels with drawn swords, St. Susenyos slaying
Werzelya for the protection of mothers and infants, magic squares and eight-pointed stars, the net of
Solomon for capturing demons, and other figurative illustrations and designs. The magic scrolls were generally rolled up in small leather capsules, enabling them to be worn on the body. Occasionally,
we find fairly modern examples of these rolls sewn into the capsules so that they cannot be read. However, most were made to be opened and even hung on walls for prayer and protection.
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For ten years, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success has been the leading go-to source for those writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their... more
For ten years, Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success has been the leading go-to source for those writing articles for peer-reviewed journals. It has enabled thousands to overcome their anxieties and produce the publications that are essential to succeeding in their fields. Each week, readers learn a particular feature of strong articles and work on revising theirs accordingly. At the end of twelve weeks, they send their article to a journal. This invaluable resource is a guide to publishing articles in the humanities; qualitative social sciences; social, behavioral, and health sciences; and the social science professions (such as education).
The second edition of the workbook is expanded, addressing a wider range of scholars and disciplines, and adding three new chapters (including one on making claims for significance). It also provides two tracks through the workbook, one for those revising a text for publication and a different one for those writing an article from scratch, as well as allowing for different timeframes depending on the scholar’s schedule and the article’s state. The instruction is even easier to follow with more targeted exercises and specialized checklists. Finally, the workbook is updated with the advice of many users of the first edition; the new research about faculty productivity, scholarly writing, and citation; and the data about new journal processes. It still retains what readers liked about the first edition, especially its humor, encouraging tone, and stories.
Key Features
• Has a proven record of helping students and faculty publish. Developed by Belcher over two decades of teaching scholarly authors in a range of disciplines, the second edition is the refined product of repeated experimenting in the laboratory of the classroom, including beta-testing by a dozen scholars before final revision. Empirical evidence on the successful use of the first edition has been published in dozens of journals.
• Proceeds step by manageable step: Within the context of clear deadlines, the workbook provides the instruction, exercises, and structure needed to write an article from scratch or revise a classroom essay, conference paper, dissertation chapter, master′s thesis, or unfinished draft into a journal article and send it to a suitable journal.
• Targets the biggest writing challenges: This workbook focuses squarely on the most difficult tasks facing scholarly writers, such as getting motivated, making an argument, and creating a logical whole.
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks can be used individually or in groups, and is particularly appropriate for graduate student professional development courses, junior faculty orientation workshops, post-doc groups, and journal article writing courses.
The second edition of the workbook is expanded, addressing a wider range of scholars and disciplines, and adding three new chapters (including one on making claims for significance). It also provides two tracks through the workbook, one for those revising a text for publication and a different one for those writing an article from scratch, as well as allowing for different timeframes depending on the scholar’s schedule and the article’s state. The instruction is even easier to follow with more targeted exercises and specialized checklists. Finally, the workbook is updated with the advice of many users of the first edition; the new research about faculty productivity, scholarly writing, and citation; and the data about new journal processes. It still retains what readers liked about the first edition, especially its humor, encouraging tone, and stories.
Key Features
• Has a proven record of helping students and faculty publish. Developed by Belcher over two decades of teaching scholarly authors in a range of disciplines, the second edition is the refined product of repeated experimenting in the laboratory of the classroom, including beta-testing by a dozen scholars before final revision. Empirical evidence on the successful use of the first edition has been published in dozens of journals.
• Proceeds step by manageable step: Within the context of clear deadlines, the workbook provides the instruction, exercises, and structure needed to write an article from scratch or revise a classroom essay, conference paper, dissertation chapter, master′s thesis, or unfinished draft into a journal article and send it to a suitable journal.
• Targets the biggest writing challenges: This workbook focuses squarely on the most difficult tasks facing scholarly writers, such as getting motivated, making an argument, and creating a logical whole.
Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks can be used individually or in groups, and is particularly appropriate for graduate student professional development courses, junior faculty orientation workshops, post-doc groups, and journal article writing courses.
Research Interests:
This volume constitutes the first English translation of Latin letters relating to the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: African Studies, Ethiopian Studies, African History, African Literature, African Women's Studies, and 9 moreWomen In African Colonial History, Seventeenth and eighteenth-century women writers, women moral philosophers, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), African Art History, Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, Ethiopian-European encounter, Illuminated manuscripts, Ethiopian history from the 17th to the 19th century, and Ethiopian Christianity(Women In African Colonial History, Seventeenth and eighteenth-century women writers, women moral philosophers, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), African Art History, Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, Ethiopian-European encounter, Illuminated manuscripts, Ethiopian history from the 17th to the 19th century, and Ethiopian Christianity)
(Women In African Colonial History, Seventeenth and eighteenth-century women writers, women moral philosophers, Manuscripts (Medieval Studies), African Art History, Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, Ethiopian-European encounter, Illuminated manuscripts, Ethiopian history from the 17th to the 19th century, and Ethiopian Christianity)
As a young man, Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century, translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo, a tome by a Portuguese missionary about the country now known as Ethiopia. Far from... more
As a young man, Samuel Johnson, one of the most celebrated English authors of the eighteenth century, translated A Voyage to Abyssinia by Jeronimo Lobo, a tome by a Portuguese missionary about the country now known as Ethiopia. Far from being a potboiler, this translation left an indelible imprint on Johnson. Demonstrating its importance through a range of research and attentive close readings, Abyssinia's Samuel Johnson highlights the lasting influence of an African people on Johnson's oeuvre. http://global.oup.com/academic/product/abyssinias-samuel-johnson-9780199793211?q=wendy%20belcher&lang=en&cc=us
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Three thousand years of writing in Africa has yielded perhaps ten known biographies of African women written by Africans before the nineteenth century. Autobiographies by premodern African women are even rarer; an early hagiography about... more
Three thousand years of writing in Africa has yielded perhaps ten known biographies of African women written by Africans before the nineteenth century. Autobiographies by premodern African women are even rarer; an early hagiography about an Ethiopian woman, however, may constitute such a text. Gädlä Krəstos Śämra (The Life-Struggles of Krəstos Śämra [Christ Delights in Her]), written in an Ethiopian monastery sometime between 1450 and 1508, is about a saintly woman who lived in the fifteenth century (no exact dates of her birth or death appear in her hagiography). The text gives a short overview of Krəstos Śämra’s life in the third person, but then proceeds in the first person as Krəstos Śämra describes a series of her religious visions, including one in which she attempts to reconcile Christ and Satan. Although the text contains a few biographical details about her, it is more of an intellectual autobiography, the narrative of one woman’s philosophy and her belief in the possibilities for healing a broken world. As such, this text expands our understanding of the global female visionary tradition, which tends to be oriented more toward reconciliation than damnation. Krəstos Śämra must be placed alongside such visionary medieval women saints as the English Christians Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the Muslims Rabia of Basri and Lalla Aziza, and the Hindu Mirabai. Despite its value, her hagiography has been translated only into Amharic and Italian; in this chapter portions appear in English for the first time.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This volume constitutes the first English translation of Latin letters relating to the Jesuit mission in Ethiopia.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: History()
()
ABSTRACT:The earliest known book-length biography about an African woman, written in 1672 in the Gəˁəz language, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Wälättä eṭros, features a life-long partnership between two women and same-sex sexuality... more
ABSTRACT:The earliest known book-length biography about an African woman, written in 1672 in the Gəˁəz language, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Wälättä eṭros, features a life-long partnership between two women and same-sex sexuality among nuns. Revered Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church leader Wälättä eṭros (1592–1642) and another nun, ∃ḫətä Krəstos, “lived together in mutual love, like soul and body” until death. Other nuns are depicted as “being lustful” with each other. Interpreting the women’s relationships in this Ethiopian text requires different reading protocols, merging surface and symptomatic reading as well as attending to Ethiopian authorial and interpretive practices, protocols for which queer theory provides useful warnings and tools. This is the first scholarly article proffering a queer reading of pre-twentieth-century sub-Saharan African literature. By foregrounding a text in an African language, this article alerts us to the dimensions of and possibilities for queer experiences outside of the arena of twentieth-century Europhone African literatures.
Research Interests:
Many assume that African women did not play an intellectual or political role before the modern period. Taking advantage of rare sources in Portuguese, Latin, and Gəʿəz, this article analyzes European and African texts written in the... more
Many assume that African women did not play an intellectual or political role before the modern period. Taking advantage of rare sources in Portuguese, Latin, and Gəʿəz, this article analyzes European and African texts written in the 1600s about Ethiopian royal women who led their people in resisting Portuguese proto-colonialism. The texts display quite different perspectives on the women, but they agree that women participated in defeating this European incursion. Comparing the two traditions reveals that the negative Portuguese representations of these Ethiopian royal women were not just the result of misogyny, but were a vanquished foe's bitter depiction of a victorious enemy. Indeed, these early modern African women must be acknowledged as some of the earliest pioneers against European incursions in Africa. This article focuses on the extraordinary, larger-than-life stories of six such women.
Research Interests: History, Sociology, Portuguese, Ethiopian Studies, African History, and 15 moreColonialism, Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Jesuit missionaries, Anti-Colonialism, Saints, Ethiopian History, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, East African history, Ethiopian Christianity, and Colonialism and Imperialism(Colonialism, Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Jesuit missionaries, Anti-Colonialism, Saints, Ethiopian History, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, East African history, Ethiopian Christianity, and Colonialism and Imperialism)
(Colonialism, Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Jesuit missionaries, Anti-Colonialism, Saints, Ethiopian History, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, East African history, Ethiopian Christianity, and Colonialism and Imperialism)
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Translation of Marian miracle, with Michael Kleiner
Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 138-144
Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2019, pp. 138-144
Research Interests:
Three thousand years of writing in Africa has yielded perhaps ten known biographies of African women written by Africans before the nineteenth century. Autobiographies by premodern African women are even rarer; an early hagiography about... more
Three thousand years of writing in Africa has yielded perhaps ten known
biographies of African women written by Africans before the nineteenth
century. Autobiographies by premodern African women are even rarer; an early hagiography about an Ethiopian woman, however, may constitute such a text. Gädlä Krəstos Śämra (The Life-Struggles of Krəstos Śämra [Christ Delights in Her]), written in an Ethiopian monastery sometime between 1450 and 1508, is about a saintly woman who lived in the fifteenth century (no exact dates of her birth or death appear in her hagiography). The text gives a
short overview of Krəstos Śämra’s life in the third person, but then proceeds in the first person as Krəstos Śämra describes a series of her religious visions, including one in which she attempts to reconcile Christ and Satan.
Although the text contains a few biographical details about her, it is more of an intellectual autobiography, the narrative of one woman’s philosophy and her belief in the possibilities for healing a broken world. As such, this text expands our understanding of the global female visionary tradition, which tends to be oriented more toward reconciliation than damnation. Krəstos Śämra must be placed alongside such visionary medieval women saints as the English Christians Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the Muslims Rabia of Basri and Lalla Aziza, and the Hindu Mirabai. Despite its value, her hagiography has been translated only into Amharic and Italian; in this chapter portions appear in English for the first time.
biographies of African women written by Africans before the nineteenth
century. Autobiographies by premodern African women are even rarer; an early hagiography about an Ethiopian woman, however, may constitute such a text. Gädlä Krəstos Śämra (The Life-Struggles of Krəstos Śämra [Christ Delights in Her]), written in an Ethiopian monastery sometime between 1450 and 1508, is about a saintly woman who lived in the fifteenth century (no exact dates of her birth or death appear in her hagiography). The text gives a
short overview of Krəstos Śämra’s life in the third person, but then proceeds in the first person as Krəstos Śämra describes a series of her religious visions, including one in which she attempts to reconcile Christ and Satan.
Although the text contains a few biographical details about her, it is more of an intellectual autobiography, the narrative of one woman’s philosophy and her belief in the possibilities for healing a broken world. As such, this text expands our understanding of the global female visionary tradition, which tends to be oriented more toward reconciliation than damnation. Krəstos Śämra must be placed alongside such visionary medieval women saints as the English Christians Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the Muslims Rabia of Basri and Lalla Aziza, and the Hindu Mirabai. Despite its value, her hagiography has been translated only into Amharic and Italian; in this chapter portions appear in English for the first time.
Research Interests:
An Ethiopian friend once joked that no matter what question you ask an Ethiopian, the answer always begins, “Well, three thousand years ago . . . “ When I repeat this witticism to other Ethiopians, however, I rarely get a smile. History... more
An Ethiopian friend once joked that no matter what question you ask an Ethiopian, the answer always begins, “Well, three thousand years ago . . . “ When I repeat this witticism to other Ethiopians, however, I rarely get a smile. History is a serious matter in the highlands of East Africa. Most Habesha (the name of a particular group of peoples of the Ethiopian
and Eritrean highlands) have a highly elaborated discourse about their centrality to global history. As it turns out, they are right. My argument in this chapter is a double one: the historical record indicates not only that the Habesha have been central to all of human history but also that they have been engaged for millennia in convincing powerful outsiders to recognize and respect them. Dwelling at the intersection of immense religious and technological differences and surrounded by powerful empires—Egyptian, Roman, and Byzantine, to name just a few—the Habesha responded to this liminality by making costly investments in broadcasting their own achievements and singularity. However, since so much of the early research on Ethiopia was dismissive or outright racist, I have written this chapter to set straight some matters for the lay reader. I look at the origin of human beings and the Punt, D'MT, Aksumite, and Solomonic empires.
and Eritrean highlands) have a highly elaborated discourse about their centrality to global history. As it turns out, they are right. My argument in this chapter is a double one: the historical record indicates not only that the Habesha have been central to all of human history but also that they have been engaged for millennia in convincing powerful outsiders to recognize and respect them. Dwelling at the intersection of immense religious and technological differences and surrounded by powerful empires—Egyptian, Roman, and Byzantine, to name just a few—the Habesha responded to this liminality by making costly investments in broadcasting their own achievements and singularity. However, since so much of the early research on Ethiopia was dismissive or outright racist, I have written this chapter to set straight some matters for the lay reader. I look at the origin of human beings and the Punt, D'MT, Aksumite, and Solomonic empires.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The earliest known book-length biography about an African woman, written in 1672 in the Gəˁəz language, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Wälättä P̣eṭros, features a life-long partnership between two women and same-sex sexuality among... more
The earliest known book-length biography about an African woman, written in 1672 in the Gəˁəz language, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Wälättä P̣eṭros, features a life-long partnership between two women and same-sex sexuality among nuns. Revered Ethiopian Orthodox Täwaḥədo Church leader Wälättä P̣eṭros (1592-1642) and another nun, Ǝḫətä Krəstos, “lived together in mutual love, like soul and body” until death. Other nuns are depicted as “being lustful” with each other. Interpreting the women’s relationships in this Ethiopian text requires different reading protocols, merging surface and symptomatic reading as well as attending to Ethiopian authorial and interpretive practices, protocols for which queer theory provides useful warnings and tools. This is the first scholarly article proffering a queer reading of pre-twentieth-century sub-Saharan African literature. By foregrounding a text in an African language, this article alerts us to the dimensions of and possibilities for queer experiences outside of the arena of twentieth-century Europhone African literatures.
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Attached is the Gəˁəz original of the Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros (EMIP 2141; Belcher Selamawit 04; MS J) (warning, the file is very large, 42 MB). MS J was microfilmed at the Ethiopian female saint Walatta Petros’s monastery of Qʷäraṭa on Lake... more
Attached is the Gəˁəz original of the Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros (EMIP 2141; Belcher Selamawit 04; MS J) (warning, the file is very large, 42 MB). MS J was microfilmed at the Ethiopian female saint Walatta Petros’s monastery of Qʷäraṭa on Lake Tana in the 1970s; but the attached is what was digitized there in 2010 by Wendy Laura Belcher and Selamawit Mecca. MS J includes the Gädlä Wälättä P̣eṭros, the Täˀamərä Wälättä P̣eṭros, and the Sälamta Wälättä P̣eṭros. MS J has an additional (four pages) Short History of the Walatta Petros Community in a different hand, dated 1681. It has one illustration. In it, blessings are invoked upon Abbess Amätä Dǝngǝl, Abbot Zä-Ḥawaryat, and the scribe Gälawdewos. Includes marks for the months for reading and previous cataloging marks. MS J is most likely the original manuscript written down by Gälawdewos in 1672 about the religious leader and monastic founder Walatta Petros (1592-1642). MS J is one of the main bases for the translation Gälawdewos, The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Translation of a Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an African Woman. Trans. and ed. Wendy Laura Belcher and Michael Kleiner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. The anecdote of the lustful nuns begins on image 112 (the main part on the right-hand page, right column) and then continues a bit onto image 113.
Research Interests:
Many assume that African women did not play an intellectual or political role before the modern period. Taking advantage of rare sources in Portuguese, Latin, and Gəʿəz, this article analyzes European and African texts written in the... more
Many assume that African women did not play an intellectual or political role before the modern period. Taking advantage of rare sources in Portuguese, Latin, and Gəʿəz, this article analyzes European and African texts written in the 1600s about Ethiopian royal women who led their people in resisting Portuguese proto-colonialism. The texts display quite different perspectives on the women, but they agree that women participated in defeating this European incursion. Comparing the two traditions reveals that the negative Portuguese representations of these Ethiopian royal women were not just the result of misogyny, but were a vanquished foe’s bitter depiction of a victorious enemy. Indeed, these early modern African women must be acknowledged as some of the earliest pioneers against European incursions in Africa. This article focuses on the extraordinary, larger-than-life stories of six such women. Published in Northeast African Studies 13, no. 1 (spring 2013): 121-166.
Research Interests: Women's Studies, Women's History, Ethiopian Studies, African History, Colonialism, and 14 moreEthiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Jesuit missionaries, Anti-Colonialism, Saints, Ethiopian History, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, East African history, Ethiopian Christianity, and Colonialism and Imperialism(Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Jesuit missionaries, Anti-Colonialism, Saints, Ethiopian History, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, East African history, Ethiopian Christianity, and Colonialism and Imperialism)
(Ethiopian languages, Gender and religion (Women s Studies), Women In African Colonial History, Jesuits, East African literature, Jesuit missionaries, Anti-Colonialism, Saints, Ethiopian History, Ethiopian-European encounter, Jesuits in Ethiopia, East African history, Ethiopian Christianity, and Colonialism and Imperialism)
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Los Angeles, California: UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research, August 20, 1996
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Research Interests:
A month after the Los Angeles civil unrest in 1992, a team from UCLA agreed to provide technical assistance to two community organizations exploring alternative strategies for addressing the economic problems of South Central Los Angeles,... more
A month after the Los Angeles civil unrest in 1992, a team from UCLA agreed to provide technical assistance to two community organizations exploring alternative strategies for addressing the economic problems of South Central Los Angeles, particularly the racial tension between merchants and residents. The three organizations submitted a proposal to the Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) for technical assistance funds
to develop an alternative to mainstream plans for the development of South Central, the community hardest hit by the civil unrest and decades of economic neglect. Their proposal (see Appendix 1) described liquor stores as sites of intra-minority conflict and proposed that these sites be turned into keys for developing a new economic base that would meet the needs of South Central residents (mostly African American and Latino) and entrepreneurs (mostly Korean). Although the UCLA team expressed a strong desire to address a broader set of economic and race-related issues, the two community
organizations felt called to immediate and concrete action by their constituencies. On principle, the UCLA team took its lead from the community organizations. This report details the goals, results, and lessons of the ensuing project.
The people who initiated the proposal were Paul Ong of UCLA’s urban planning program, Karen Bass of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (CCSAPT), and Bong Hwan Kim of the Korean Youth Community Center (KYCC) (see Appendix 4).
to develop an alternative to mainstream plans for the development of South Central, the community hardest hit by the civil unrest and decades of economic neglect. Their proposal (see Appendix 1) described liquor stores as sites of intra-minority conflict and proposed that these sites be turned into keys for developing a new economic base that would meet the needs of South Central residents (mostly African American and Latino) and entrepreneurs (mostly Korean). Although the UCLA team expressed a strong desire to address a broader set of economic and race-related issues, the two community
organizations felt called to immediate and concrete action by their constituencies. On principle, the UCLA team took its lead from the community organizations. This report details the goals, results, and lessons of the ensuing project.
The people who initiated the proposal were Paul Ong of UCLA’s urban planning program, Karen Bass of the Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment (CCSAPT), and Bong Hwan Kim of the Korean Youth Community Center (KYCC) (see Appendix 4).