Steven J. Salm is the Class of 1958 Endowed Professor in History and serves as chair of the Department of History at Xavier University of Louisiana. He has conducted fieldwork throughout West Africa and has received a number of awards and fellowships for his work, including a William S. Livingston Fellowship, an NEH grant, and four Mellon grants for collaborative research. His books include Culture and Customs of Ghana (Greenwood, 2002), four edited volumes on urbanization in Africa, and Globalization and the African Experience (Carolina Academic Press, 2012). He has also published numerous chapters and articles on topics as diverse as gender, youth, music, literature, religion, urbanization and popular culture that have appeared in a variety of academic journals and edited books. Salm teaches courses in African history, the Black Atlantic World, African Popular Culture, and Research Methods and in 2005 was named History Teacher of the Year by Xavier University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.