Jean Allman

Title:	J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities in Arts & Sciences Professor of History
Degree:	PhD, Northwestern University BA, Northwestern University
Dept:	History
Office:	Busch 210
Phone:	(314) 935-9599
E-mail:	jallman@wustl.edu

Research Interests
Professor Allman's work focuses on African history through a range of thematically diverse, yet overlapping topics -- nation and national identity, gender and colonialism, fashion and the politics of clothing, and the modernity of indigenous belief systems. The thread that runs through all of her work is a fundamental concern with the construction of “vernacular modernities,” that is, an insistence on the centrality of so-called “traditional” societies to the making of the modern and on the importance of dismantling eurocentric binaries -- local and global, traditional and modern -- that relegate most African communities to the margins of history. She is concerned with the ways in which African women and men, in their homes and communities, through their belief systems and material cultures, have positioned themselves as central actors in the making of the modern world.

Selected Publications
TONGNAAB: The History of a West African God. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2005. (with John Parker)

Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress. (Edited and introduced). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.

“‘Let Your Fashion Be in Line with Our Ghanaian Costume’: Nation, Gender and the Politics of Clothing in Nkrumah’s Ghana.” In Fashioning Power. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004.