Director of the Center for African Studies and associate professor of African American Studies, G. Ugo Nwokeji has expertise in the cultural history and political economy of Africa since 1500, with a particular focus on international commerce in the Nigerian Niger Delta and its hinterland. His research topics also include slavery, migration, and colonial and postcolonial political economy, including concerns with oil and gas. His book, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, won The 2011 Melville J. Herskovits Book Prize awarded by the African Studies Association. Having published studies on petroleum and the Atlantic slave trade, he has turned attention to a new project ("The Slave Trade, Oil, and Globalization in the Niger Delta").