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“Jean has a rare ability to understand an author’s purpose and to draw out their strengths. She combines a dazzling intellect with decades of experience as an editor. She edited two books I wrote for Ohio University Press’s New African Histories series. In the case of the first book, The Forger’s Tale, she saw that it needed a completely new Introduction in order to highlight core issues – conceptual, methodological, and ethical – that were dispersed through the manuscript as a whole. Working with her was such a positive experience I sent her the next book, too!”

 —Stephanie Newell, George M. Bodman Professor of Literature, Yale University 

“Jean Allman knows how to tell the kind of strong and compelling story that good research reveals. I worked with her for 15 years on the New African Histories series during which time I had the good fortune to observe her rare combination of editorial skill, exceptional academic acumen, and empathetic temperament in service to authors and the many award-winning and seminal books in that series. 

“Jean has unique experience in the majority of academic gatekeeping roles in the humanities and social sciences and she  honed her deep understanding of the shaping of academic writing as an excellent author of books, journal articles, successful grants and proposals, as a series editor and a journal editor. Her experience, imagination, and razor- sharp clarity of thought combine to make for one of the finest academic developmental editors I have known. She is also a lot of fun to work with.”

—Gillian Berchowitz, former Director and Editor-in-Chief, Ohio University Press

“What is likely to happen to you if you are a scholar, let alone a graduate student, trying to publish from the African continent? If you think you have something new and different to add to a field or paradigm dominated by scholars in the Euro-American academy, you can be told that you must cut back and fit in. You can be told that your material must be made to slot into the conceptual frameworks set out elsewhere. And you can get disheartened: at the way Eurocentric viewpoints and epistemologies are reproduced despite generations of critique. 

Still, my co-editor, Gary Minkley, and I made a decision to proceed with this book, Ambivalent, in spite of it all – largely to celebrate the exciting new work of doctoral students and young colleagues, but also so that our classes in different parts of Africa would be able to read about African arts and archives by African scholars, to make it feel much closer to them.

When we sent our book proposal to the New African Histories series at Ohio, Jean got this immediately, when other publishers and reviewers resoundingly did not. Instead of being told to cut back, we were told to go bigger. I want to tell you what it’s like, quite simply, to be met in this way, as we were by Jean.  

And we all had our reward. We now debate the Ambivalent chapters in the classroom and they have fired up new graduate work; we won the NIHSS award for best edited volume in South Africa; and we had the honour of Ambivalent becoming the focus of a roundtable discussion in the American Historical Review steered by the superb Jennifer Tucker and in which five scholars thoroughly engaged the book. This meant that instead of remaining on the margins, we were delivered right into the heart of the mainstream historical discipline and the global academy. All the authors have gone on to expanded career paths. What more can I say? Thank you, Jean.

—Patricia Hayes, NRF SARCHl Chair in Visual History and Theory,
University of the Western Cape, South Africa

“I am grateful to Professor Jean Allman’s invaluable help in shaping the final outcome of my book. The narration to the ‘Introduction’ would not have been possible without her editorial guidance and I am grateful for the assistance.”

  —Elizabeth W Giorgis, Author of Modernist Art in Ethiopia, Associate Professor of History of Art, Criticism and Theory, The Africa Institute, Sharjah, UAE 

“Jean Allman helped me write my dissertation, she helped me find a voice as a writer, and later I had the pleasure of working with her as an editor of an important book series. I’ve never been around anyone who sees the point more clearly, who thinks with greater force and insight, and who can more quickly sort out the wheat from the chaff. Jean will help you get your book into the best shape that it can be.”

—Derek R. Peterson, FBA, Ali Mazrui Collegiate Professor of
History & African Studies, University of Michigan