Welcome to the homepage of Dr. Kathleen O'Mara, Professor of Africana and Latino Studies and History.  I am currently Chair of the Department of Africana and Latino Studies, a department dedicated to examining the lives and cultures, past and present, of the peoples of Africa in the old world and in diaspora (USA, Caribbean, South America, Europe) and of Latinos, at home and in diaspora in the western hemisphere.

     I received my PhD in African History from Columbia University. My primary areas of teaching and research are African and Middle Eastern history, and within those fields my research has focused on the economic and social history of Islamic West and North Africa. I have published on Saharan Studies, especially on the precolonial political economy of the Sultanate of Ahir (Niger). I have studied Arabic at the Bourguiba Institute, Université de Tunis as well as at Columbia University (where I also studied Hausa), taught for two years at the Université d'Alger, Faculté des Arts et Sciences Humaines, and received a Fulbright Fellowship to Egypt where I researched the impact of men's emigration on Egyptian women's work opportunities and economic autonomy. My research has been presented at a number of conferences in the US, Canada, Europe and Africa.

     For a number of years I served as Chair of the Women's and Gender Studies Department and continue to edit and produce Phoebe: Gender and Cultural Critiques, a SUNY based journal which has international circulation and contributors drawn from institutions all over the USA, Western Europe Asia, Africa and elsewhere. My interest in researching gender and sexuality has resulted in several articles, based on oral histories, about late 20th century sexual identity formation and the experiences of American lesbian, gay, bisexual & transgender college students and urban West African youth. This work has been presented at academic conferences in Washington D.C., Wilmington-Del, London-England, Goteborg- Sweden and Istanbul-Turkey.  I have also presented work at the U of KwaZulu- South Africa based on oral histories of Somali refugees in East Africa & North America.Two current projects are: "Africana & Latino Studies-Intersections" is a reader of seminal articles and new essays which I am co-editing with Dr. Enrique Morales-Diaz and a volume of essays, co-edited with Liz Morrish (Nottingham Trent University, UK) entitled "Confounded Sexual Identity: the negotiation of concealment and revelation." I have taught the only history of sexuality courses on this campus  and those devoted to the history of L-G-B-T people/communities in the US, Europe and Africa (WmSt 294 Sexual Communities: Sum '96 & Spr '98; WmSt 398 Seminar, Lesbian Sexualities: Fa '98 and WmSt 398 Seminar, History of Sexuality: Spr 2001 and Hist 394: Sex, Disease & Empire in Africa (Spr 2005).