Recentering Liberia: Possibilities, Innovation, and Development in the 21st Century
From April 23-25, 2026, the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, along with co-sponsorship support from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts Conference Fund and the Five College Symposium Fund, will be hosting the 57th Annual Conference of the Liberian Studies Association here at UMass Amherst.
Keynote Speaker, Dr. Layli Maparyan, 16th President, University of Liberia
Luncheon Plenary Speaker, Dr. Ishmael N. Annang, Assistant Professor of History, Mount Holyoke College
See the Liberian Studies Association website for more information!
Dr. Layli Maparyan, 16th President of the University of Liberia is a former Katherine Stone Kaufman ’67 Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (2012-15), where she also served as a Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Dr. Maparyan was Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and associated faculty of African American Studies at Georgia State University (GSU) where she was the inaugural Chair of the University Consortium for Liberia, a regional collective of Southeastern U.S. institutions with projects in Liberia. In 2010, she served as a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Liberia, where she developed a model gender studies curriculum. Known for her scholarship in womanism, Dr. Maparyan’s publications include The Womanist Reader (Routledge, 2006), The Womanist Idea (Routledge, 2012), and Womanism Rising (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Dr. Maparyan earned a Ph.D. in Psychology from Temple University and an M.S. in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University.
Dr. Ishmael N. Annang is an assistant professor of history at Mount Holyoke College. He is an historian of society and environment in Africa and the African Atlantic. His research and teaching interests are on topics/themes including agricultural resources, racial capitalism, diplomacy, health and healing, gender, riverine systems, and the oral/material methodology. These interests have informed his ongoing first book project tentatively titled "Growing Food, Eating Medicine: Agricultural Festivals and Spiritual Ecology in Africa's