Amanda Logan is AT&T Research Professor and associate professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. Her current focus is building a community-engaged archaeology of food security that traces how, where, and when chronic hunger emerged across the African continent — and how, where, and when it was avoided.
Logan’s acclaimed The Scarcity Slot: Excavating Histories of Food Security in Ghana (University of California Press, 2020) was recognized with the 2021 First Book Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. It is the first monograph to critically examine food security in Africa’s deep past via a pathbreaking archaeological ethnography of food in Banda, Ghana, that spans the last six centuries. Logan has published in numerous archaeology and anthropology journals, including a 2016 paper in American Anthropologist that was awarded the 2017 Gordon R. Willey Prize from the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. Her work has been featured by NPR, Archaeology magazine, and the Africa Report, and further accolades include the 2013 Society of American Archaeology Dissertation Award.
Logan earned a BA from Simon Fraser University, an MA from the University of Missouri, and a PhD from the University of Michigan.
Logan’s project, “An Environmental History of Food Security in Africa,” uses archaeology to build deep histories of food security across the African continent to reframe how we approach development today.
Twitter:
@amandaloganNU
