Research
Ceaios ledership
CEAIOS director is Chapurukha M Kusimba. He is Professor of Anthropology. He studies the development of precolonial complex societies in Eastern and Southern Africa. He received his BA in African History at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, and his master鈥檚 and Doctorate in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. He has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Fellowships, and numerous other grants. He has authored or co-authored several books, including The Rise and Fall of Swahili States (1999), and multiple articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes. He was elected Fellow, Class III Section 5: Anthropology and Archaeology in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
CEAIOS Associate director is Sibel B Kusimba. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at USF-Tampa. She has conducted anthropological fieldwork in Kenya on topics ranging from inter-ethnic cooperation to leadership, to environmental change, to the origins of trade. Her first book African Foragers was named an outstanding academic book by the American Library Association and examines the history of hunter-gatherers in East Africa through the lenses of environments, technology, and interactions. She is also the co-editor of East African Archaeology: Potters, Smiths and Traders, and she has been a special issue editor for the journals Economic Anthropology and The Journal of Cultural Economy. Since 2012 she has been researching the history and anthropology of money. Her book Reimagining Money: Kenya in the Digital Finance Revolution explores digital money in Kenya, a leading site for new financial technologies and innovations, from an anthropological perspective. Professor Kusimba has garnered numerous grants, including three National Science Foundation Grants, one of which was an REU grant in 2007-2008 to support an NSF undergraduate research site in Kenya; three grants through The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) in 2012, 2014, and 2015; and a grant from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2015-2017). Her current research on the financial innovations of globalized African women is being funded by the Financial Sector Deepening Trust (2022). She has held and two year-long Fulbright appointments through the US Department of State to Kenya.