Barbara M. CooperBarbara M. Cooper is a Professor of History at Rutgers University. A social and cultural historian of francophone West Africa, she earned her Ph.D. in African History at the African Studies Center of Boston University. Her research has fcused upon shifts in gender, law, health, family life, and agricultural practices in Niger. Her first book, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa society in Niger (Heinemann 1997) set out how men and women negotiated the rapidly changing political economy of the 20th c. through reinterpretations of marriage. Her second book Evangelical Christians in the Muslim Sahel (Indiana University Press 2006) was awarded the African Studies Association prize for the best book in African Studies published in 2006. It traces the interactions of Anglophone evangelical missionaries, French colonial administrators, and Muslim communities as a small but vibrant Christian community emerged in Niger. Most recently she co-edited a translation of Hadiza Moussa's pathbreaking ethnography, Yearning and Refusal: An Ethnography of Female Fertility Management in Niamey, Niger (Oxford University Press 2023). Read More Read Less