Office: 322 Old Horticulture
Office Hours: TBA
Year in Program: 4
Advisor: Dr. Walter Hawthorne
Committee: Nwando Achebe, David Robinson, & Mara Leichtman
Fields of Interest: African History, Islam in Africa, Environmental History, Gender History, & Environmental Anthropology.
Languages: Mandinka, Wolof & French
Education: B.A. in Development Studies & History from University of The Gambia (2014), M.A. in Political Science from Ohio University, (2017).
Email: jabangab@msu.edu
Abdoulie Jabang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at Michigan State University. He holds a B.A. in Development Studies and History from University of The Gambia, and M.A. in Political Science from Ohio University-Athens.
His dissertation, (provisionally titled) “Reproducing Environmental Inequalities: Geographies of Power and Production in the Gambia, 1840-1980,” reconstructs the socio-environmental history of the lower and middle reaches of the Gambia River Basin. His dissertation scrutinizes a variety of sources about the evidence of differential access to and control over environmental resources, and the inequalities it reproduced. His research explore the effects of environmental control and environmental change on both powerful and marginalized groups of people, highlighting the myriad ways that people have creatively adapted to and resisted environmental change and injustice. His work uncovers the resilience of politically dispossessed individuals and communities by centering the strategies they undertook to mitigate environmental inequalities. Thus, his research pushes the edges of social and environmental history by considering how environmental control and change reshaped class, religious, and gender relations in the Gambia River Basin. In so doing, his research embraces multidisciplinary methods to studying questions about the exercise of power in past and present environmental conditions.
Over the past few years, Jabang has received awards and grants in recognition of his scholarly research and contributions. In 2019, his article “Trans-regional Migration, Controlling Rain, and Spreading Islam in the Lower Gambia, 1887-1920” won the M.S.U. Muslim Studies Program Graduate Research Paper Prize. In 2020, his essay “Mobility and Religious Encounter on the Margins: A Religious Pursuit of Alhagie Mohammed Farang Njie, 1890s-1970s” won the M.S.U. History Department’s 2019-2020 Jeff Rooney Paper Prize. In 2021, he received a Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) from the Social Science Research Council to support his dissertation fieldwork in The Gambia and the United Kingdom.