Nomination: Professor Eduardo Viana Vargas – Anthropology Department, Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences – UFMG.
Period: August 4th and October 10th, 2014
Tukufu Zuberi is professor of sociology and African studies at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. He has been a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and the University of Dar es salaam, Tanzania. At the University of Pennsylvania he was Chairman of the Department of Sociology, the Graduate Group in Demography and the African American Studies Program, and in 2002, he became founding director of the Center for African Studies at this University.
Zuberi wrote and produced the film African Independence, a feature film that presents the birth, development and problems faced by the movement that gained independence in Africa. The film received numerous awards, including Best Documentary and Best Director.
Additionally, Zuberi is an exhibition curator. In May 2013, he curated the exhibition Tides of Freedon: African Presence at the Independence Seaport Museum in the US state of Delaware and the exhibition Black Bodies in Propaganda: The Art of the War Poster held at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in June of the same year.
For the past twelve years, Zuberi has dedicated himself to hosting and co-producing the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) television series History Detectives. Zuberi is also the author of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot: The Mortality Cost of Colonizing Liberia in the Nineteenth-Century, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1995; and Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2001; and African Independence published by Rowan and Littlefield in 2015. He is also editor of General Demography of Africa (a multi-volume work).
Zuberi has produced more than 50 academic articles, and edited or co-edited eight volumes. Among these volumes: White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (with Eduardo Bonilla-Silva), a work that received the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award from the American Sociological Association.