Advisory Board
Seni M. Adio Seni is an Attorney-at-Law and a member of the Nigerian Bar, as well as those of New York and Massachusetts in the United States of America. He has held senior executive positions in both business and law related capacities, namely as Chief Corporate Services Officer and later Managing Director of a gaming and entertainment company.
Notably, before returning to Nigeria, Seni practiced law at the international law firm of MINTZ LEVIN in Boston, Massachusetts, where he achieved the remarkable feat of becoming a Litigation Partner. While in the United States, he counselled multinational publicly-held conglomerates and private companies on various matters, including but not limited to, Fiduciary Law and Corporate Governance; Legislative and Regulatory Matters before the U.S. Congress; Intellectual Property Law; Internet Technology and Security; Insurance and Coverage Disputes; and Business Torts (including Unfair Trade Practices, Commercial Libel and Breach of Contract).
Seni has provided commentaries on issues of business, law and racial diversity to various media outfits, including the Associated Press (AP), CBS Marketwatch, Boston Magazine and the Washington, DC based Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Magazine. He is active in civic organizations, and served as a Trustee of certain non-profit institutions in the academic, healthcare, economic-empowerment and ecumenical arenas. He has also been a speaker at international conferences/seminars, including the American Bar Association Annual Meeting, and was a moderator at a symposium at the Harvard Club in New York concerning privatisation in Nigeria.
Mr. Adio obtained his Bachelor of Laws with honours (LL.B Hons.) from The University of Buckingham, United Kingdom and his Master of Laws (LL.M) from Boston University School of Law, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He enjoys running and completed two Boston Marathons.
Professor Akyeampong joined the History faculty at Harvard upon receiving his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received his master's degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1989, where he concentrated on English labor history, and his bachelor's degree in History and Religions from the University of Ghana at Legon in 1984.
At Harvard, Professor Akyeampong is the faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a board member of the Du Bois Institute. As the chair of the Committee on African Studies, he has been instrumental, along with Professor Gates, in creating the Department of African and African American Studies.
Professor Higginbotham's research and writing focus primarily on African American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Professor Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in American History, an M.A. from Howard University, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before coming to Harvard, she taught at Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University.
Francis Abiola Irele is from Nigeria, where he was Professor of French at the University of Ibadan, and served from 1977 to 1980, and from 1983 to 1987, as Head of the Department of Modern Languages. Previously, he has held positions at the University of Lagos, the University of Ghana, Legon, and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Nigeria. From 1987 to 2003, he was Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at Ohio State University, and Editor for Research in African Literatures (1992 to 2003). He was Visiting Professor at the University of Dakar during the 1979-1980 academic year, and in 1999, he held an appointment as Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Professor Irele also spent the Fall semester of the year 2001 as Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Professor Irele pursued a degree in English at University College Ibadan, graduating in 1960 with honors from the University of London, and, in 1966, went on to obtain a doctorate degree from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) with a dissertation on the poetry of Aimé Césaire.
Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is presently MD/CEO of NOI Global, a Financial Advisory and Development Consulting Services Company based in both Nigeria and the United States.
From June to August 2006, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, overseeing Nigeria’s international relations. She headed Nigeria’s acclaimed Presidential Economic Team, responsible for implementing President Obasanjo’s sweeping economic and social reform agenda for Nigeria.
From July 2003 to June 2006, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala, served as Minister of Finance and Economy for the Federal Republic of Nigeria. As Finance Minister, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala managed the finances for Africa’s largest country of over 150 million people, with federation revenues of over $45 billion (2005). Dr. Okonjo-Iweala led the work and the negotiations that resulted in an $18 billion or 60% cancellation of Nigeria’s $30 billion Paris Club debt, the second largest debt cancellation in the Paris Club’s 50 year history. As a result of the debt cancellation and an innovative Debt Buy Back Scheme, Nigeria exited the Paris Club April 2006, thereby bringing the country’s external debt burden down from $35 to $5 billion. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala also spearheaded the drive to get Nigeria’s first ever BB- Credit rating in January 2006 from international ratings agencies Fitch and Standard & Poors, a rating that placed Nigeria in the league of several emerging market countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Vietnam, Philippines and Turkey.
Prior to becoming Finance Minister, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala was Vice President and Corporate Secretary of the World Bank Group where she pursued a 21 year career as a development economist. Dr. Okonjo-Iweala graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude in Economics from Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in Regional Economics and Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of numerous awards including an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Brown University in 2006, one of America’s premier universities, an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Northern Caribbean University, Mandeville Jamaica, Global Finance Minister of the year 2005 award, from Euromoney Magazine and Time Magazine European Heroes 2004 award. Dr. Okonjo –Iweala is married to surgeon, Dr. Ikemba Iweala, and they have four children .
Calestous Juma is Professor of the Practice of International Development and Director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and Founding Director of the African Centre for Technology Studies in Nairobi, and he also served as Chancellor of the University of Guyana. He has been elected to several scientific academies including the Royal Society of London, the US National Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. He has won several international awards for his work on sustainable development. He holds a PhD in science and technology policy studies and has written widely on science, technology, and environment. He teaches courses in developmental policy as part of the MPA/ID Program . He is lead author of Innovation: Applying Knowledge in Development. He is editor of the International Journal of Technology and Globalisation and International Journal of Biotechnology.
Heloule Mohallim, is an attorney in the Corporate Department at Ropes and Gray LLP, and is a member of the International Practice Group. Heloule practices in the Corporate Department representing borrowers in large syndicated debt financings, often in leveraged acquisitions, and also representing lenders and issuers in mezzanine and subordinated debt transactions. He also works with private companies in connection with initial and follow-on venture capital investments. In addition, he works with public company clients in connection with securities law compliance.
He received a B.A. in Political & Social Thought from the University of Virginia in 1999. And earned a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center in 2002
Professor Monson specializes in jazz, African American music, and music of the African diaspora. She is author of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996) winner of the Sonneck Society's Irving Lowens award for the best book published on American music in 1996. Her most recent work is on Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967, (2005). She is also editor of The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000). This collection of essays presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora that engage with the broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music. Contributors include Akin Euba, Veit Erlmann, Eric Charry, Lucy Durán, Jerome Harris, Travis Jackson, Gage Averill, and Julian Gerstin. Professor Monson earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Musicology from New York University, her B.M. from New England Conservatory of Music, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Economics.
Dr. Judith Palfrey is the Chief of the Division of General Pediatrics at Children's hospital and the T. Berry Brazelton Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She is actively involved in community medicine programs in Boston and throughout the United States. At Children's Hospital, she directs service activities in child health and advocacy, as well as a fellowship training program and several research projects. She has a special interest in programs for children with disabilities.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay is the G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music at Harvard University and a former Chair of the Department of Music. An ethnomusicologist specializing in musics of Africa, the Middle East, and the urban United States, she received her Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of Michigan.
Josef Sorett is presently in the final year of a Ph.D. program in Harvard University's Department of African and African American Studies. At Harvard, he has concentrated his studies on African American religious history, and his research interests include religion and the arts, popular culture, and the role of religion in public life. His dissertation, Spirit Soundings: Religion, Race and the Arts in Twentieth Century America, engages the arts as a lens into the America religious landscape and, more specifically, explores the way that religion has figured into black aesthetic debates. In support of his research, Josef has received fellowships from the Louisville Institute for the Study of American Religion, The Fund for Theological Education, Harvard's Charles Warren Center for American History and Princeton University's Center for African American Studies. He is also affiliated with the Hiphop Archive at Harvard University. Josef has taught at Harvard, Tufts, Princeton and Medgar Evers College (City University of New York). In addition to his academic pursuits, Josef maintains a commitment to public service and is active in the non-profit and policy world serving as a consultant on projects that address the impact of religion, race and culture in American society. Josef, his wife Ayanna, and their son Jacob Patrick, live in New York City.
Doris Sommer is Ira Jewell Williams, Jr., Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University. Professor Sommer's research Interests have developed from the 19th-Century novels that helped to consolidate new republics in Latin America through the particular aesthetics of minoritarian literature, including bilingual virtuosity, to her current more general pursuit of the constructive work in rights and resources that the arts and the humanities contribute to developing societies. She is author of: Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (University of California Press, 1991); Proceed with Caution When Engaging Minority Literature (Harvard UP, 1999); Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (Duke University Press, 2004); Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer, Palgrave, 2004); and Cultural Agency in the Americas edited by Doris Sommer (Duke University Press, 2006). Professor Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education; she has B.A. from New Jersey's Douglass College for Women, M.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and her Ph.D. is from Rutgers The State University.
Dr. Geoff Ward is Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. Professor Ward has degrees in sociology from Hampton University (B.A., 1994) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D., 2001). His work focuses on the intersection of race, crime, and justice, juvenile justice administration, the justice profession, and research methods. His dissertation,"Color Lines of Social Control: Juvenile Justice in a Racialized Social System, 1825-2000," examined how African-American youth and communities have experienced and shaped the development of the U.S. juvenile justice system, using several case studies to further develop our understanding of "race-effects" in this context. From 2001-2003, Professor Ward held the Mellon Fellowship on Race, Crime, and Justice at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York City. At Vera, Professor Ward expanded his work through a study of Harlem's juvenile court community and further research on the scope and significance of racial diversity in the criminal justice profession. Professor Ward also spent the past two years as a coordinator of the Africana Criminal Justice Project, a research, education, and organizing initiative of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.
Dagmawi Woubshet is Assistant Professor of English at Cornell University, where he teaches courses on African-American and African literature and culture. Woubshet is currently working on a project that considers the creative responses to the AIDS catastrophe, particularly in the United States, South Africa, and Ethiopia. He's also the author of a forthcoming memoir, "New Flower."