Olufemi Vaughan, Ph.D.

Olufemi Vaughan is the Alfred Sargent Lee ‘41 & Mary Ames Lee Professor and Chair of Black Studies at Amherst College. He earned his PhD (D.Phil) in Politics from Oxford University in 1989. Professor Vaughan’s scholarship and research covers a wide range of disciplines in African studies and African diaspora studies in the humanistic social sciences, including politics, history,sociology, religion, development studies, cultural studies, and global studies.Professor Vaughan is the author of numerous scholarly articles and author andeditor of many books and volumes, including Letters, Kinship, and Social Mobility in Nigeria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), Religion and theMaking of Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2016), Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics (University of Rochester Press, 2000), The Oxford Encyclopedia: African Historiography— Methods and Sources, Volumes 1 & 2(Oxford University Press, 2019). Professor Vaughan has been awarded several prestigious fellowships, including a Guggenheim fellowship and a Wilson fellowship. Prior to his appointment at Amherst College, he was professor of History & Africana Studies and associate provost at Stony Brook University(SUNY) and Geoffrey Canada Professor of Africana Studies & History and Chairof Africana Studies at Bowdoin College.