Ned Alpers received his Ph.D. from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1966. After teaching at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, he joined the faculty at UCLA, returning to Africa for research, including a year up country in Tanzania and a Fulbright year at the Somali National University in Mogadishu. His research and writing focus on the political economy of international trade in eastern Africa through the nineteenth century, including the cultural dimensions of this exchange system and its impact on gender relations, with special attention to the wider world of the western Indian Ocean. He has served as President of the African Studies Association (1994) and Chair of its National Program Committee (2001). Professor Alpers has published Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (1975) and a wide range of chapters in books and scholarly articles. He has co-edited with Pierre-Michel Fontaine Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar (1982), with William Worger and Nancy Clark Africa and the West: A Documentary history from the Slave Trade to Independence (2001), and with Vijaya Teelock History, Memory, and Identity: The Origins of Mauritian Slaves (2001). He is currently writing a political economy of eastern Tanzania in the nineteenth century while at the same time engaged in a long-term study of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean. He will also be writing a text entitled The African Diaspora: A Global Perspective. Professor Alpers has served as chair or co-chair for forty-one Ph.D. dissertations and presently chairs or co-chairs the committees of a dozen advanced graduate students.