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Home > Islamic Studies Affiliated Faculty > Allen F. Roberts
A photo of Allen F. Roberts

Allen F. Roberts

Professor
E-mail: aroberts@arts.ucla.edu Office: Kaufman 130E

Although my graduate training was in socio-cultural Anthropology, with a BA from Amherst College, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago, and a postdoc in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, I have worn a lot of different hats ever since. Early on, I spent a summer as a gandy dancer on the Alaska Railroad, replacing and lining track after the horrific 1964 earthquake; participated in a prehistoric archaeology project in France; and took a year off from college to teach middle school in the Republic of Chad, returning to the same country after college as a Peace Corps Volunteer (see http://spotlight.ucla.edu/peace-corps-50th/allen-f-roberts).

At the University of Chicago my PhD advisor was the late Victor Turner, a noted theorist of ritual, religion, and performance studies; and I conducted 45 months of dissertation research on symbolic systems and local-level politics along the southwestern shores of Lake Tanganyika in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My monograph in historical ethnography, A Dance of Assassins: Performing Early Colonial Hegemony in the Congo (2013, Indiana University Press) is based upon this research, as are my many writings on arts and expressive cultures of central Africa.

    About Allen F.

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Near Eastern Languages and Cultures is part of the Humanities Division within UCLA College. 378 Kaplan Hall | Los Angeles, CA 90095 | P: 310-825-4165 | F: 310-206-6456 | E: nreast@humnet.ucla.edu University of California © 2023 UC Regents

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