Investing in Excellence: The Case for MSU's Ph.D. Program in African History 

By Dr. Walter Hawthorne, Professor, Department of History

Michigan State University's Ph.D. program in African History is a university asset of national consequence—and it is now in immediate jeopardy. A recent decision by the College of Arts and Letters to remove the Department of History from participation in Integrative Studies in the Arts and Humanities has resulted in more than a $500,000 cut to the Department's graduate budget. The consequences are already being felt: this year, the Department was forced to rescind offers of admission to three of the strongest Africanist Ph.D. applicants in the country. If current conditions persist, the program will likely admit no students next year, and the following year it could collapse entirely.

Such an outcome would end a program that has consistently ranked among the top three in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report, reaching number one in the survey's most recent full evaluation. For nearly sixty years, this program has built a scholarly reputation that reflects directly on Michigan State University. Its decline is not inevitable, but preventing it requires timely and decisive action from university leadership.

A Foundation Built on Institutional Vision

MSU was a trailblazer from the outset. In the 1960s, as African nations were expelling European colonizers and looking to American universities for partnership and expertise, MSU's President John A. Hannah launched the African Studies Center in 1960 and partnered with soon-to-be Nigerian President Nnamdi Azikiwe and other Nigerian leaders to establish the University of Nigeria, Nsukka—a case of the nation's premier land-grant university helping to create the first land-grant university on the African continent. That founding vision of global partnership and ethical engagement has defined MSU's Africa programming ever since.

In 1961, Professor James Hooker became MSU's first Africanist historian, bringing expertise in southern Africa developed during his service as a historical analyst for the Department of the Army. Under his supervision, Gabriel Ihie Chinenye Eluwa and Charles Kenneth Wylie became the first students to receive Ph.D.s in African History at MSU, both completing their degrees in 1967—among the first such degrees awarded anywhere in the United States. In 1968, the program expanded its geographic scope to include Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, broadening MSU's Africanist reach across the continent.

In 1978, Professor David Robinson joined the Department, eventually authoring twelve books on Islam, colonialism, and development in Francophone West Africa. His scholarship earned him a University Distinguished Professorship in 1992 and one of a very small number of honorary doctorates awarded by the University of Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar—a testament to the international standing MSU's program had achieved. Robinson was joined at various points by Professor Elizabeth Eldredge, a historian of southern Africa, and for nearly fifteen years by Dr. Darlene Clark Hine, whose Comparative Black History Program created a scholarly bridge from Africa to its diasporas that could not be found elsewhere in the country. Both Robinson and Sociology Professor David Wiley—longtime director of the African Studies Center—provided national leadership in African Studies as officers and presidents of the African Studies Association, the office that MSU African History Professor Nwando Achebe currently holds.

From the 1960s through the 1990s, the university invested deeply and broadly in Africa initiatives across campus. The Africana library collection expanded to become one of the largest in the United States. Graduate student preparation was strengthened through instruction in 29 African languages. Faculty strength in African Studies grew across thirteen colleges. African History became one of many gems within an institution genuinely committed to meaningful, equity-based collaboration with communities and scholars across the continent.

Rebuilding and Expanding for the Twenty-First Century

In the early 2000s, as the program navigated a period of faculty transition, MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon joined in efforts to maintain African History as a top-ranked program dedicated to engaged scholarship and teaching. Embracing what Simon called the World Grant Ideal, the university recommitted to excellence in African History and conducted a successful national search. In 2005 and 2006, MSU History welcomed four new faculty members—Drs. Nwando Achebe, Peter Alegi, Laura Fair, and Walter Hawthorne—who collectively revitalized and extended the program's reach. (Dr. Fair has since moved to another university.) In 2016, Dr. Jamie Monson joined MSU as director of the African Studies Center, bringing expertise in China-Africa relations and technology transfer with regard to Chinese development assistance in Africa; she provided invaluable leadership before her retirement. Professor Michelle Moyd joined the team in 2022, strengthening the program's coverage of eastern Africa, soldiering, and warfare.

The program continues to attract exceptional scholarly talent. In Fall 2026, Dr. Nicholas Nyachega will join the Department as Assistant Professor of History. An African historian from Zimbabwe's Honde Valley borderlands, Nyachega earned his Ph.D. in African History and Development Studies from the University of Minnesota. His book project conceives of African borderlands as contested spaces and places of contradiction—geographies of complex everyday encounters, struggles over knowledge and power, strategies of self-determination, and human possibility. His research and teaching span African history, global borders and borderlands, migration and security, gender and mobility, and colonialism and liberation movements. His arrival deepens the program's coverage of southern and eastern Africa and brings timely new expertise in borderlands and migration scholarship to a department already recognized for its geographic and thematic breadth.

Today, the faculty teaching in the Ph.D. program in African History are:

• Professor Nwando Achebe — oral history, women, gender, and sexuality in Nigeria and West Africa
• Professor Peter Alegi — nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa, sports, and podcasting
• Professor Walter Hawthorne — West African, Atlantic, and digital history; slavery and the Atlantic slave trade
• Associate Professor Michelle Moyd — eastern Africa, soldiering, and warfare
• Assistant Professor Nicholas Nyachega (joining Fall 2026) — African borderlands, migration and security, gender and mobility, colonialism and liberation movements

This team is complemented by Associate Professor John Aerni-Flessner of the College of Arts and Letters, whose work centers on the history of Lesotho. The broader Department of History adds further depth through world-renowned scholars of the African American experience and historians who work on diaspora, digital humanities, gender, and migration creating productive intellectual synergies that distinguish MSU's doctoral environment.

What a Top-Ranked Program Delivers

Since 1967, the Department has granted 103 Ph.D.s in African History. One of the program's defining strengths—and a direct expression of its founding values—is the diversity of the scholars it attracts and trains. MSU's doctoral cohorts have drawn students from across Africa, the United States, and the wider world, reflecting the program's reputation not only for scholarly excellence but for its genuine commitment to equity, inclusion, and partnership with the communities whose histories it studies. Graduates have come to East Lansing from Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, Ghana, The Gambia, Senegal, Cape Verde, Zambia, Cuba, Israel, China, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and the United States, among other places—and they have carried MSU's reputation with them to universities around the world. Recent Ph.D.s hold positions at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Nebraska, University of Pittsburgh, North Carolina State University, Southern Methodist University, Brigham Young University, James Madison University, University of Kansas, University of Nairobi, Kenyatta University, Addis Ababa University, and University of Cheikh Anta Diop, among many others. These placements are not incidental—they are an ongoing return on MSU's investment, multiplying the university's scholarly reputation across the globe.

The program's distinction rests on three pillars that merit continued administrative support. 

First, institutional infrastructure. A doctoral program does not reach the top of its field on its own. It rises in an environment that invests in it. MSU's consistent top ranking in African History is inseparable from its broader commitment to Africa across the institution: one of the ten federally funded Title VI National Resource Centers for African Language and Area Studies; 160 world-acclaimed faculty across disciplines offering 29 African languages and advanced interdisciplinary study; one of the largest Africana library collections in the United States; distinguished Africa collections at the MSU Museum, Kresge Art Gallery, and Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum; and the Alliance for African Partnerships, which is developing innovative new models of research collaboration with African universities and communities. The MSU Press, through its African History and Culture book series (edited by Peter Alegi) and the Journal of West African History (edited by Nwando Achebe) and Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (edited by Walter Hawthorne), further amplifies the program's scholarly reach. This ecosystem of support is what makes excellence possible—and what must be maintained.

Second, digital innovation and public impact. MSU's program in African History is distinguished nationally by its commitment to digital public outreach, carried out in partnership with MATRIX, MSU's Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences. A flagship example is Enslaved.org, an internationally acclaimed linked open data platform for the study of slavery that has attracted more than $5 million in external funding and serves researchers, educators, and communities around the world. These collaborations have also produced a wide range of other internationally recognized projects—including the Africa Past and Present podcast; digital galleries such as the Willis E. Bell Photographic Archive, Archive of Malian Photography, Islam and Pluralism in West Africa, African Oral Narratives, the African Online Digital Library, the African Activist Archive, and South Africa: Overcoming Apartheid, Building Democracy. The program also benefits from its deep ties to H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online, founded in 1993 and housed in the MSU History Department, and from LEADR, the Department's Lab for Education and Advancement of Digital Research. Together, this digital infrastructure keeps MSU's African History program connected to scholars and communities on multiple continents, generates substantial grant revenue for the university, and positions the program at the forefront of the discipline's future.

Third, faculty distinction and external funding. The MSU Department of History houses the largest concentration of Africanist historians in the United States, a concentration that is growing. Together, the program's faculty have published extensively in prestigious venues, received major scholarly prizes, and directed excellent doctoral students into faculty positions at top institutions worldwide. They have secured significant external funding from the Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, National Endowment for the Humanities, and World Health Organization, among others—funding that returns prestige and resources to the university. Their research spans West, East, and Southern Africa across pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods, with particular depth in cultural, social, gender, and borderlands history. The hire of Dr. Nyachega is a signal that this program is not resting on past achievement—it is actively recruiting the next generation of scholars.

A Legacy Worth Sustaining 

What unites this program across six decades is a commitment to the ethical, socially engaged, Africa-centered scholarship that Professor Robinson and the program's founding generation pioneered at MSU—a commitment that current faculty have extended and deepened. The program recruits diverse cohorts of students—domestic and international, with many from Africa—and insists on rigorous language training, sustained fieldwork in Africa, and the cultivation of genuine, long-term partnerships with African universities and communities built on equity, transparency, reciprocity, and mutual respect. It produces scholars who advance social justice, engage with schools and the public, and illuminate the historical roots of issues that Africa and the world face today.

Approaching sixty years of Ph.D.s. A sustained top-three national ranking. Graduates shaping the discipline on five continents. A new generation of faculty carrying the program forward. None of this happened without investment. All of it depends on investment continuing.

The program is positioned to build on its legacy. The question before the university is whether it will provide the support to make that possible, or will let it collapse.