Greetings from the new board of CASA, Nicole Eggers (President), Jeremy Rich (Vice President, and Joshua Castillo (Treasurer). We hope this newsletter finds you  in fine health and (for those in northern climes) enjoying the restorative months of summer.  In the coming years, we hope to restore the CASA tradition of periodic newsletter updates, beginning with this one. 

CASA Conference 2024

Let us begin by sharing the news of the conference that CASA organized later year. In collaboration with the University of Kinshasa, CASA organized a conference in Kinshasa, DRC, in July of 2024. It was a one-day conference on the theme of “Remembrance, Reckoning, and Renewal: Central Africa into the 21^st Century.” The conference featured presentations from 19 different scholars of Central Africa, presenting on a wide range of topics from multiple disciplines. You can view the full program here.  It was an international conference, with scholars attending from both western and central African institutions. The conference was well-attended and sparked meaningful intellectual exchange between all attendees and participants. The small nature of the conference made it an intimate affair that the board hopes will promote future collaborations between participants. Building on the success of this conference, we hope to arrange another conference in the near future. Special shoutout to our sponsors, who helped to finance the conference: the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, the University of Nevada-Reno, and Johns Hopkins University. Above you can see a few photos from the event. 

ASA Conference 2025

For those who will be in attendance at the ASA in Atlanta in November, CASA  will be holding our annual meeting there (time/place TBD). CASA has also sponsored two different panels that we hope you will attend: 

Resisting Boundaries: Women, Gender, and Transnational Narratives in Central Africa, Chair: Catherine Porter

Panelists: Nancy Rose Hunt, Sarah Van Beurden, Catherine Porter, and Nicole Eggers

Discussant:Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Mobility, Displacement, and Politics In and Out of the DRC (Roundtable)

Roundtable Chair: Jeremy Rich, Marywood UniversityPresenters:Roger Alfani,, Nicole Eggers, Jeremy Rich, Marywood University, Adrien Ngudiankama, Gillian Mathys

Junior Scholar Essay Prize

During the ASA meeting, we will announce the fourth recipient of CASA’s Annual Prize for the Best Essay in Central African Studies written by a junior scholar, and the two other finalists for the prize.  Previous recipients were Chetima Melchisedek (2016), and Claudia Gastrow (2018), and Emery Kalema (2021). We are excited to bring back this prize this year. We still have two request related to this prize:

1.       If you, your student, or a junior colleague of yours has published an article that you think should be considered, please add the article to this list.  

2.     If you would be willing to serve as a judge for this contest, please email me: eggersna@utk.edu .  Anyone who is not eligible for the prize can serve as a judge. I have done this service in the past and it is quite enjoyable – it’s fun to read the great work young scholars are doing in our field. So please do consider volunteering. This service would require reading and ranking the eligible articles and then attending a short online meeting with fellow judges this fall, sometime in the weeks leading up to the ASA in Atlanta, to choose a winner.

CASA Membership Renewal

If you have not yet done so, please Renew your 2025 subscription to CASA ($30 for faculty, $20 for students). This is important to support our social events and bi-annual prize. You can find directions on how to do so on our website, here.

New CASA Projects

The CASA board has been discussing some possible new project ideas for CASA. Some ideas that have been discussed include: 

1.         A book prize for Central African Studies. Other regions of Africa have a dedicated book prize. We think Central Africa should as well. 

2.         A CASA podcast. What would it look like to create a public facing outlet for CASA expertise?

3.         Website Updates: We have been working on some updates to the CASA website, which you can check out here. If you have any ideas for how to improve the site, please bring them to us. We are still working on collecting titles for a bibliography on central African studies that can be published on our website.  If you would like your book(s) to be included on the list, please add the publication information to this document. Books (monographs or edited collections) only, please.

4.          

New Books on Central Africa

Finally, since our last newsletter was published in 2021, a number of exciting books have been published within Central African Studies. We have composed a list of some of the recent titles here. If you find a book published between Oct 2021 and June 2025 is missing, please let me know and I will update the list.

Abdelmadjid, Salim, Marie-Aude Fouéré, and Maëline Le Lay, eds. Thinking Africa with V.Y. Mudimbe. Twaweza Communications, 2025.

Bernault, Florence, Benoît Henriet, and Emery Kalema, eds. Textures of Power: Central Africa in the Long Twentieth Century. Leuven University Press, 2025. 

Braun, Lesley Nicole. Congo’s Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa. University of Wisconsin Press, 2023. 

Eggers, Nicole, Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo. Ohio University Press, 2023. 

Fraiture, Pierre-Philippe (editor), Unfinished Histories: Empire and Postcolonial Resonance in Central Africa and Belgium,Leuven University Press, 2022.

Gastrow, Claudia. The Aesthetics of
Belonging: Indigenous Urbanism and City Building in Oil-Boom Luanda. The University of North Carolina Press, 2024.

Idesbald Goddeeris, Amandine Lauro, Guy Vanthemsche (eds), Colonial Congo: A History in Questions, BREPOLS, 2024.

Gondola, Didier (ed.), Herbert Weiss: Historien et témoin de la lutte pour l’indépendance au Congo. 

Hendriks, Thomas, Rainforest Capitalism: Power and Masculinity in a Congolese Timber Concession, Duke University Press).

Maxwell, David. Religious Entanglements: Central African Pentecostalism, the Creation of Cultural Knowledge, and the Making of the Luba Katanga. University of Wisconsin Press, 2022. 

Monaville, Pedro. Students of the World:
Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo. Duke University Press, 2022.

Niehuus, Rachel Marie. An Archive of Possibilities: Healing and Repair in Democratic Republic of Congo. Duke University Press, 2024.

Thill, Michel, The Police, the State and the Congo Cop, Bloomsbury / Zed Books, 2025.

Thornton, John, Afonso I Mvemba a Nzinga, King of Kongo, Hackett Publishing Company, 2023.

Van Beurden, Sarah, Didier Gondola and Agnès Lacaille (eds.), (Re)Making Collections: Origins, trajectories & reconnections / La fabrique des collections: origines, trajectoires & reconnexions, Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities 181.  Tervuren, Royal Museum for Central Africa, 2023

Vogel, Christoph N.,  Conflict Minerals, Inc. War, Profit and White Saviourism in Eastern Congo (2022; online edn, Oxford Academic, 19 Jan. 2023)