Sandra T. Barnes

Sandra T. Barnes is Secretary of the American Council of Learned Societies. She "is Professor of Anthropology and Founding Director of the African Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of three books and numerous articles, most recently an expanded, second edition of Africa's Ogun: Old World and New, an interdisciplinary collection focusing on West African religious culture and its continuing vitality in diaspora. Her book, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos, won the Amaury Talbot Prize for best book on Africa awarded by the Royal Anthropological Society of Great Britain and Ireland. She has held several national fellowships, sat on the Board of Directors and served as President of the African Studies Association, and sat on the boards of the Foundation for the Advancement of Medical Education and Research and the Stanford Humanities Center and served as a visiting faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Ibadan. She was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2004-2005. She was educated at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (PhD, 1974). Her current research focuses on West Africa: pre-colonial social and cultural life along the Guinea Coast and post-colonial popular culture."