Name:		Gwendolyn Mikell
		Month:		February 2004
		Schools:		Univ. of Chicago, B.A., 1969 Columbia: M.A. 1974, Ph.D. 1975
		Organization:		Georgetown University
		Title:		Director, African American Studies Program and Professor of Anthropology

Gwendolyn Mikell is the Director of the African Studies Program in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. Between January 2000 and June 2003, she was also a Senior Fellow in African Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Her research and writing has been focused on political and economic transitions in Africa, and on gender and peace building during African transitions. She is Past President of the African Studies Association and has held Fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Smithsonian Museum of African Art, the Institute for Developing Economies in Tokyo, the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana-Legon, and the University of Natal in South Africa. Dr. Mikell is also embarking on research on the impact of culture and historical experience in the formulation of Africa policy in the U.S. and the U.K. over the last decade.

Dr. Mikell has held a number of positions at Georgetown, from Assistant Professor through Full Professor. She helped to create the Africa Program in 1981, and she served as chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department. Prior to coming to Georgetown, she was an Assistant Professor of anthropology and black studies at Rutgers University, Newark.

Dr. Mikell bridges the worlds of academia and foreign policy. She has been involved in a number of foreign policy consultancies with non-governmental, governmental, and inter-governmental organizations. This has included work with the G8 Workshop on African Peace Initiatives in Berlin, as well as with the African Center for Strategic Studies on civil-military relations workshops in Botswana, Gabon, and Washington, D.C. She has served as a consultant to the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Presidential Center on Nigerian and Ghanaian electoral issues, the United States Information Agency in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, the Foreign Service Institute, the African-American Institute, and the Museum of African Art. She has been involved in a number of economic and political study missions - to Japan, with American and Japanese Scholars on African issues, with the White House Conferences and workshops on Africa, and to Nigeria through the Department of State.

Her memberships include the Council on Foreign Relations, the African Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, and the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women. She is a member of the selection committee for the British Marshall Fellowships and has been a Board Member of the Third World Conference Foundation, ACLS, the National Summit on Africa, and the Association for Women In Development. She has traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, Asia, Russia, and Uzbekistan.

She is the author of Cocoa and Chaos in Ghana (Howard University Press, 1992; Paragon Press, 1989); and African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1997). Her recent articles are in such journals as Chimera (2003), CSIS series (2000), African Studies Review (1999), Tulsa J. Comparative & Internat. Law (1997), Yale J. Internat. Law (1991), J.Modern African Studies (1989), Ethnology (1988). Her forthcoming book manuscript is on African women's involvement in peace and war.

Dr. Mikell holds a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Chicago, the M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University, and a Certificate in French from the National University in Cote d'Ivoire.