John Thabiti Willis

John Cardon Willis was born in Philadelphia, PA but spent the majority of his childhood in Birmingham, AL. While undergoing his undergraduate education at Clark Atlanta University, he joined Ndugu-Nzinga (a rite of passage organization in Atlanta, GA) and acquired the name, Thabiti, and inspiration to study the African past. In 2005, he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Nigeria to conduct research that became the basis of his first book, Masquerading Politics. He now works as an associate professor of the history of Africa (and of the African diaspora) at Carleton College in Minnesota, U.S.A. He explores the cultural and social factors that have shaped the history of Africans and their descendants in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds. He focuses on the ways that people narrate the past, construct identity, and, like artists, act with an awareness of an audience.