The Sudan Handbook

8 thE sudan handbook

ChERRy LEonaRdi is a Lecturer in African History at Durham

University. Her research and publications since 2001 have focused on

the historical and contemporary role of chiefs in southern Sudan, and

related issues of governance, state-society relations and political and

judicial cultures. She was lead researcher and author of Local Justice in

Southern Sudan, a report for the Rift Valley Institute and the US Institute

of Peace (2010). She was Director of Studies of the RVI Sudan Course

2009–2010.

DaniEl LaRGE is Research Director of the Africa Asia Centre at the

School of Oriental and African Studies in London. He was the founding

Director of the Sudan Open Archive (www.sudanarchive.net), a digital

library established by the Rift Valley Institute in 2005 to provide open

access to contemporary and historical knowledge about Sudan, and

Deputy Director of the RVI Sudan Course 2005–2010.

DEREk WElsby has been directing archaeological excavations in

central and northern Sudan since 1982. In 1991 he joined the Depart-

ment of Egyptian Antiquities – now the Department of Ancient Egypt

and Sudan – at the British Museum, with special responsibility for the

Sudanese and Nubian collections. He is Honorary Secretary of the Sudan

Archaeological Research Society and until recently was President of the

International Society for Nubian Studies.

DouGlas H. Johnson is a specialist in the history of North East

Africa. He has served as Assistant Director for archives in the Southern

Regional Government (1980–3), as a resource person in the negotia-

tions over the Three Areas (Abyei, the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile)

during the IGAD-sponsored peace talks (2003), as a member of the Abyei

Boundary Commission (2005), and as adviser to GoSS on the north-

south boundary (2007). His works include Nuer Prophets (1994) and The

Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars (2003; revised edition 2011). His Where

Boundaries Become Borders, a report on the north-south borderlands and

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors

(www.riftvalley.net).