Congratulations to Dr. Shayla Monroe!

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Monroe begins her first semester this Fall 2023 at Harvard University as a new tenure-track Assistant Professor.  She began her career at Howard University, where she was an undergraduate research assistant in the Montague Cobb Lab under Dr. Flordeliz T. Bugarin, Associate Professor in the Department of African Studies.  Dr. Bugarin introduced her to African archaeology and gave her hands-on archaeological experience in the lab, working with the collections from Kunte Kinteh Island in the Gambia, West Africa (a trading site that was significant in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) and Nicodemus, Kansas (an all-African American site established in the Reconstruction period).  

From a spark of interest in African studies, archaeology, anthropology, and history that began at Howard U., Dr. Monroe went on to earn her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and develop into a well-respected scholar. Following her time at Howard, she became a Eugene Cota-Robles scholar and a recipient of the University of California, President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship. 

Dr. Monroe specializes in faunal analysis, the social zooarchaeology of Sudan and Egypt, and the archaeology of African pastoralism. Her dissertation analyzed the acquisition of cattle at the ancient Egyptian colonial fortress of Askut (c. 1850 – 1550 BC) and its implications for culture contact and asymmetrical power relations between pastoralists and non-pastoralists.  Since 2013, she has worked as an archaeologist at the 3rd Cataract of the Nile River in Sudan, first at the Egyptian colonial site at Tombos, and then at the Kerma hinterlands site, Abu Fatima, a site also located in northern Sudan.

Congratulations to Dr. Monroe!  She is a great example of what can come out of an undergraduate degree from Howard University and the opportunities for undergraduate research related to understanding the African world.