Leonardo A. Villalón
Associate Professor
Director, Center for African Studies
Ph.D., University of Texas-Austin, 1992
Email:villalon@africa.ufl.edu
Home Page: click here
Leonardo A. Villalón is Associate professor of Political Science and Director of the
Center for African Studies and at the University of Florida.
Villalón has a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, as well as degrees from the Institut dóEtudes Politiques in Paris, the School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University, and Louisiana State University. His research specialization is in the field of African politics, where he has focused in particular on issues of Islam and politics and on democratization in the Sahelian countries of Senegal, Mali, and Niger.
He is the author of Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal (Cambridge University Press, 1995),
and co-editor of The African State at a Critical Juncture: Between Disintegration and Reconfiguration (Lynne Rienner publishers, 1998),
and
The Fate of Africa's Democratic Experiments: Elites and Institutions . (Indiana University Press, 2005), as well as of numerous articles and book chapters on politics and religion in West Africa. A paperback edition of his Islamic Society and State Power in Senegal will be published by the Cambridge University Press in 2008.
Villalón taught for two years as a Fulbright senior scholar at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal. He has also taught at the Université Gaston Berger in St. Louis, Senegal, and has lectured and directed seminars and workshops at universities and other institutions in numerous West African countries. These have included seminars on civic education and democracy for teachers in rural Mali, workshops on democracy and the role of legislatures for the national parliaments of Chad and of Burkina Faso, and a seminar on consensus building for all parties to the conflict in Côte d'Ivoire.
From 2001-05 Villalón served as president of the West African Research Association (WARA), the only sub-Saharan African member institution of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), based at the Smithsonian Institution.
