Edna G. Bay
Ph.D., History, Boston University, 1977 

Research Interests

Trained as an interdisciplinary Africanist, I focus on projects in the cultural history of areas of West Africa. My earliest work was a women's history of Dahomey, where women served as high officials of state and constituted a major part of the kingdom's standing army. My book, Wives of the Leopard, used that research to build a gendered cultural and political history of the kingdom.

Meanwhile, I researched asen, an art form used to honor the ancestral dead, curating an exhibition in the mid-1980s and completing a book on the rise and fall of the art form that was published in 2008.

My interests in ancestors and religion led me to studies of African-derived religions in the Diaspora. I taught a semester at the University of the West Indies – Mona (Jamaica) and am doing research on the history of Haitian vodou. My interests and research are turning more and more to visual culture in the Atlantic world.

Book Projects

• Asen, Ancestors, and Vodun: Tracing Change in African Art, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008
•  States of Violence: Politics, Youth And Memory in Contemporary Africa , edited with Donald L. Donham. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006
• Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, edited with K. Mann. London: Frank Cass, 2001
• Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998 (Finalist for the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association, 1999. Selected for the ACLS History E-Book Project, 2003)
• ASEN: Iron Altars of the Fon People of Benin . Atlanta: Emory University Museum of Art and Archaeology, 1985
• Women and Work in Africa (ed). Boulder: Westview Press, 1982 (Selected for the ACLS History E-Book Project, 2006)
• Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change , edited with N. J. Hafkin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976
• African Images: Essays in African Iconology , edited with D. F. McCall. NY: Africana, 1975