Charles Edmondson Historical Lecture Series | Light From West Africa's Golden Age ft. Dr. Michael A. Gomez

The Department of History will feature two free and open to the public events for our 2026 Charles Edmondson Historical Lecture Series, African Polity, Past & Present: Innovation and Reinvention in Contexts of Opportunity and Exigency, featuring Dr. Michael A. Gomez.

The lectures will be held on April 15th and April 16th at the Armstrong Browning Library Treasure Room,  710 Speight Ave, Waco, Texas 76706. Both lectures will be held from 3:30 - 5:00 pm. 

Light from West Africa’s Golden Age

Wednesday, April 15th, 2026 | 3:30 - 5:00 pm | Armstrong Browning Library Treasure Room

This first presentation examines the ways in which West African Sahelian states, in engagement with expanding commercial opportunities as well as significant cultural change, created through experimentation forms of governance both sui generis and capacious. 

Dr. Michael A. Gomez is currently Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, and the director of NYU’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD), having served as the founding director of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) from its inception in 2000 to 2007. He is also the founding editor of the Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora (Cambridge U. Press), and the general editor of its Cambridge History of the African Diaspora, a three-volume series scheduled for 2027. He has chaired of the History Departments at both NYU and Spelman College, and was President of UNESCO's International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project from 2009 to 2011. His first book, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge University Press, 1992), examines a Muslim polity in what is now eastern Senegal. The next publication, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (UNC Press, 1998), is concerned with questions of culture and race. The edited volume, Diasporic Africa: A Reader (NYU Press, 2006), is more fully involved with the idea of an African diaspora, as is Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge U. Press, 2005 and 2019). The monograph, Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge U. Press, 2005) explores the experiences of African Muslims in bondage and freedom throughout the Americas, integrating Islamic Africa into the analysis. Gomez’s most recent book, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton U. Press, 2018), a comprehensive study of polity and religion during the region’s most iconic moment, was awarded the 2019 African Studies Association’s Book Prize (formerly known as the Herskovits Book Award), and the 2019 American Historical Association’s Martin A. Klein Prize in African History. He is also the Lead Scholar/Editor of the two-volume Hidden Voices: Stories of the Global African Diaspora (New York City Department of Education, 2023 and 2024) designed for secondary school instructors. A recipient of the American Historical Association’s 2023 Award for Scholarly Distinction, Gomez supports the struggles of African people worldwide.