This year’s Rockefeller Visiting Fellows program focuses on the role of religion in contemporary African conflicts. The program is supported through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowships program. Further information about the program, including application information for the 2004-05 academic year, is available on our website at <http://kroc.nd.edu/visiting_fellows/>.

Rosalind I. J. Hackett is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she teaches courses in religious studies, anthropology and African studies. Born and educated in Britain, she obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Aberdeen in 1986. She has published widely on new religious movements in Africa, as well as on religious pluralism, art, gender, the media, and religion in relation to human rights. She taught and conducted research in Nigeria for more than eight years and is currently finishing a book on religious conflict in Nigeria sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace. While at the Kroc Institute, Rosalind will be expanding her research on the growing links between media liberalization and religious conflict in Africa, and exploring the peacebuilding potential of the media. In that connection, she will be planning a workshop in Lagos in 2004 for Nigerian journalists on the coverage of religion and conflict.

Sakah Saidu Mahmud is Associate Professor of Political Science at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky where he teaches comparative politics of the developing world. A native of Nigeria, Mahmud received his Ph.D. (1992) from the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver. His publications include a book, State, Class and Underdevelopment in Nigeria and Early Meiji Japan, (Macmillan, and St. Martin’s Press, 1996), and a specialized monograph, Can the Nigerian Democracy Succeed? (1998) for the Stoke Phelps Foundation. Mahmud has conducted fieldwork in Nigeria, Senegal and the Republic of South Africa on human rights, democratization and development. His current research focuses on a comparative study examining how and why Islamic activism has produced civic peace in Senegal in contrast to Nigeria where activism often leads to confrontations and conflict. He conducted preliminary fieldwork in both countries and hopes to complete a book length manuscript at the Kroc Institute.

James Smith is a social-cultural anthropologist and a specialist in African studies. He received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2002. He is the author of articles and papers exploring popular East African responses to social change, economic and political liberalization, and structural adjustment. Smith’s doctoral dissertation, Bewitching Developments: the Moral Politics of Development in Kenya, examines the often surprising cultural and religious receptions and re-deployments of national and international development interventions and discourse in Kenya, and is being rewritten for publication as a book. He has received several awards for his research, including grants from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. His current research concerns conflict over cultural revivalism and new religious movements in East Africa.

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