2015 University Lecture
Sacred Waters: Historical Ecology, Power, and the Soul of the Blue Nile
Presented by James C. McCann, Professor of History and Associate Director for Development at the African Studies Center
Monday, November 2, 2015 at 7 p.m.
Tsai Performance Center
685 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts
Admission is free. The public is cordially invited.
James C. McCann is Professor of History and Associate Director for Development at the African Studies Center at Boston University. Professor McCann’s research and teaching interests include agricultural and ecological history of Africa, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa, field research methods in African studies, the agro-ecology of tropical disease, and the history of food/cuisine in Africa and the Atlantic world.
He is the author of six widely acclaimed books including, most recently, The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia: Deposing the Spirit (2015), alongside dozens of articles and reviews in premier journals spanning issues of famine, agriculture, cuisine and environmental history. His 2010 book Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine won a 2011 “Best in the World” award from Paris’ Gourmand Magazine, while 2006’s Maize and Grace: A History of Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop received the George Perkins Marsh Prize for Best Book in Environmental History.
Professor McCann was a 2012–2013 John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and in 2012–2013 was a Fulbright Fellow in Ethiopia (during which he wrote his latest book). He was named the 2014 Distinguished Scholar by the American Society of Environmental History and elected as a Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Science.
The recipient of numerous prestigious federal and private foundation grants to support his research, Professor McCann has been invited to lecture or consult for a host of international universities and foreign aid organizations, including OXFAM, UNICEF, and American Jewish World Service, and to give testimony before England’s House of Commons and the U.S. Congress.
Professor McCann served for five years as Principal Investigator of a Rockefeller Foundation research project in collaboration with the Harvard School of Public Health, exploring the agro-ecology of the cultivation of maize and malaria transmission in Africa. His current project on historical watershed ecologies with the Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future involves the establishment of an ecological science of CHANS (Coupled Human and Natural Systems).