Nemata Blyden
Nemata Blyden
Professor of History and International Affairs
Full-time Faculty
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Nemata Blyden is Professor of History and International Affairs, specializing in African and African Diaspora history. She is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019). She has also authored West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: A diaspora in reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000), and a number of articles. Professor Blyden was a consultant for In Motion: The African American Migration Experience for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), an recently served as Consultant Editor and contributor for The Black History Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained (DK Penguin Random House, 2021). She has lived in Africa, Europe and the Soviet Union.
African and African Diaspora history with strengths in the history of Sierra Leone and Liberia
Selected Publications:
"Between Africa and America: Recalibrating Black Americans' Relationship to the Diaspora," with Dr. Jeannette Eileen Jones, Perspectives on History, September 2020
Volume 58, Issue 6
“This na true story of our history”: South Carolina in Sierra Leone's historical memory” in Atlantic Studies: Global Currents, Volume 12, Issue 3, 2015, pp.
355-370.
(Re) envisioning the African Diaspora: Historical Memory and Cross-fertilization in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone in Paradoxes of History and Memory in Post-Colonial Sierra Leone, Sylvia Ojukutu-Macauley and Ismail Rashid (eds), Lexington Books, 2013
Relationships among Blacks in the Diaspora: African and Caribbean Immigrants and American-Born Blacks in Africans in Global Migration: Searching for Promised Lands, editors John A. Arthur, Joseph Takougang, and Thomas Owusu, 2012
N. Blyden and F. Akiwumi, A Perspective of the African Diaspora in the United States in John W. Frazier, Joe T. Darden, Norah F. Henry (eds), The African Diaspora in the United States and Canada at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Global Academic Publishing, 2009)
“The search for Anna Erskine: African American Women in Nineteenth-Century Liberia” in Catherine Higgs, Barbara Moss & Earline Rae Ferguson, Stepping Forward: Black women in Africa and the Americas (Ohio University Press, 2002)
"Edward Jones: An African American in Sierra Leone" in Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World, John W. Pulis (ed.) (Garland Publishing, Inc.1999).
BA in History and International Relations from Mount Holyoke College, and an MPhil and PhD from Yale University (1998).