Martin A. Klein

Martin A. Klein (born 1934 in New York City) is an Africanist and an emeritus professor in the History Department at the University of Toronto specializing in the study of African slavery, and francophone West Africa: Senegal, Guinea, and Mali.

He has contributed to African historiography, with a focus on slavery, the slave trade, and the impact of colonialism on African societies. He is a past president of both the African Studies Association (U.S.) and the Canadian Association of African Studies.

Biography Klein was born in North Pelham, New York, and raised in Mt. Vernon, Westchester County. He graduated from A.B. Davis High School and attended an interracial conference sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews. His doctoral research centered on the establishment of French colonial rule and the conflict with Islam in the Sine-Saloum region of Senegal.

Academic career Klein began his teaching career at the University of Rhode Island (1961–62) and held fellowships at the Foreign Area Training Program and the University of Chicago’s Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations. From 1965 to 1970, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as a Fulbright lecturer at Lovanium University in Kinshasa, Congo, in 1968–69. Scholarship His scholarship centers on slavery within Africa, particularly in West Africa and Senegal.

His engagement with questions of race and racism dates back to his attendance at an interracial conference in 1951, shortly after graduating from high school, an experience that helped shape his political and scholarly interest in the subject.

Klein has co-edited volumes, including Women and Slavery in Africa (1983) with Claire C. Robertson, which brought attention to the complex roles of women as both slaves and slaveholders.

He later co-edited with Alice Bellagamba and Sandra Greene on a four-volume series exploring African slavery and its legacies of memory.

Klein has contributed to the development of African historical scholarship through editorial roles with the Canadian Journal of African Studies (2000–2003) and the New Perspectives on African History series at Cambridge University Press.

Professional service and activism Klein has held several leadership roles in academic associations. In 2010, the American Historical Association awarded the first annual Martin A. Klein Prize instituted in his name for the most distinguished work of scholarship on African history published in English during the previous calendar year.

Selected publications

Books

Journals