CONTRIBUTOR:

Claire C. Robertson

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Professor Emerita

DEPARTMENT:

History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies

INSTITUTION:

The Ohio State University

BIOGRAPHY:

Claire Robertson is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University, where she taught from 1984 to 2012. She received her MA from the University of Chicago in early modern European history and her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in African history. She has published over sixty articles and six books on the subjects of women and slavery, African women and trade, education, socioeconomic structure, genital cutting, racism in the military, life histories, with particular reference to Ghana and Kenya, and is now focusing on Saint Lucia: its African connections, history from the late eighteenth century to the present, and life histories of the elderly. She received the Herskovits Book Prize from the African Studies Association in 1985 for Sharing the Same Bowl: A Socioeconomic History of Women and Class in Accra, Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), and the Peggy Koppelman Book Award from the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association for Transnational Sisterhood and Genital Cutting: Disputing U.S. Polemics, co-edited with Stanlie James, in 2003. The Bowl book plus two of her other books are available online through the ACLS classics series, and her credentials also include a number of prestigious fellowships or grants. Her current interests include women’s history, intellectual history (especially of racism), ethnobotanical history, feminist theory, political economy, marketing and small business history, comparative slavery, and local history.