Click here for Thomas A. Hale's c.v.

My path to academia was not evident from my family background or from my activities after finishing college.  I  might, for example, have been a sea captain or a publisher. Some of my New England ancestors went broke by arming their ships in order to capture British merchant vessels during the Revolution. A grandfather in the publishing business handled James Whitcomb Riley and hobnobbed with Theodore Dreiser while enjoying a lively but unremunerative career. The only early clue to my path into the African diaspora might have been a great-grandmother who housed Booker T. Washington when he came to Newburyport, Mass. to give a lecture. She earned both the scorn of some of her peers and an autographed copy of Up From Slavery from the African- American educator.

After obtaining a B.A. in French at Tufts in 1964, I was sent by the Peace Corps to Niger to work with agricultural cooperatives because French-speakers were needed. I installed an outboard motor in a 45' dugout canoe, wrestled with ornery camels, managed the purchase of the rice harvest from farmers, and taught English occasionally to the president of the country. That aroused my interest in teaching.  After returning to the U. S. in 1966, I studied medieval French literature for an M.A. at Tufts, served in Clermont-Ferrand as a French Government Teaching Assistant, and earned a doctorate at the University of Rochester with a dissertation on the Martinican writer Aimé Césaire.  He invented the term négritude to express his attachment to an African cultural heritage. I expanded considerably the appendix of the thesis into a commented bibliography, Les Ecrits d'Aimé Césaire (1978), now a basic research tool for early Césaire studies.

Hired by Penn State in 1973 to teach African literature, I helped found the African Literature Association in 1974, and, with Richard K. Priebe, co-edited two volumes of selected papers, The Teaching of African Literature (1977, 1989), and Artist and Audience: African Literature as a Shared Experience (1979). But I soon discovered that many of my colleagues didn't  know there was any literature from Africa before the 'colonial' and 'post-colonial' eras. So I went back to Niger in l980-81 to teach as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Niamey and to record epics from griots about Askia Mohammed, ruler of the Songhay empire from 1493 to 1528. The Epic of Askia Mohammed appeared in a bilingual Songhay-English format in a comparative study, Scribe, Griot, and Novelist (1990).  The English version of the text came out in paperback in 1996.  Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices from a Vast Continent, an anthology of excerpts from 25 African epics, appeared in 1997, co-edited with John Johnson and Stephen Belcher.

Few people seemed to know very much about the many functions of griots. So, building on what I collected in l980-81, I returned to Niger in 1987 and 1989 to make a video about female griots, or griottes, and start on a book about them.  An NEH Fellowship in l991-92 enabled me to interview 100 of these wordsmiths in The Gambia, Senegal, and Mali, including Timbuktu, where I also did research in a center housing 7,000 Arabic manuscripts dating to the 13th century. The book finally appeared in 1998 as Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music.

My joint appointment in French and Comparative Literature has enabled me to enjoy a variety of research on areas that are not all accessible to many of my colleagues in African literature, who are usually limited to just one of the European-language literatures of Africa.  I'm now interested in three research topics:  francophonie and Africa,  griots and the African American tradition, and, finally,  with Aissata Sidikou-Morton and a team of 15 scholars, a large project on women's songs from West Africa, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The award of a research professorship in May 2000 offered the possibility of more rapid research on these topics.  But the unexpected assignment to serve as Interim Head of French for 18 months starting in January 2001 has forced me to slow down a bit on my research agenda.  Nevertheless, I continue to teach courses on African literature and to work with a growing corps of graduate students on subjects that range from songs in East Africa to nomadism among contemporary women writers from West Africa.

You can e-mail Dr. Hale at tah@psu.edu

Or contact him at:
211 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Phone: (814) 865-1492

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This page is maintained by Lynn A. Setzler.
Page last modified on September 16, 2004.