Oberlin Launches Rotberg Lecture in African Politics with April 22 Inaugural Talk

Oberlin College and Conservatory has established the Robert I. Rotberg ’55 and Fiona J. Y. Rotberg ’90 Annual Lecture in African Politics, a new endowed series that will bring leading scholars to campus each year.

The lecture series is designed to expand opportunities for students and the broader community to engage with the study of political development across the African continent—past, present, and future—while also reflecting Oberlin’s longstanding connections to influential African leaders and thinkers.

Those connections include South African educator and African National Congress founder John Langalibalele Dube, Class of 1890; Mozambican Liberation Front president Eduardo Mondlane, Class of 1953; Nigerian scholar of Black nationalism E. U. Essien-Udom, Class of 1955; and Ghanaian Finance Minister Anthony Akoto Osei, Class of 1978.

Robert Rotberg graduated from Oberlin in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree in history; his daughter, Fiona Rotberg, graduated in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in government. She is an official with the World Wildlife Fund in Stockholm. He is president emeritus of the World Peace Foundation, a former professor of political science and history at MIT and Harvard, and a former president of Lafayette College. He is also an honorary Oberlin trustee and a former president of the Oberlin Alumni Association.

The Rotberg Lecture builds on the family’s longstanding support of Oberlin, including endowments for African sculpture at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, financial aid for students from southern Africa, and the acquisition of significant library materials in African and Latin American history and social science.

The inaugural Rotberg Lecture will take place Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at 4:30 p.m. in Craig Lecture Hall. The event is open to all members of the Oberlin campus community.

The first lecture will feature Catherine Boone, Harold Laski Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Boone will present “Political Rupture in a Post-Liberal World: Changing Regionalisms in Africa.”

Her talk will explore how current geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts are reshaping domestic politics and interstate relations across the African continent. As global power rivalries intensify, she argues, shifting economic dynamics are altering regional balances of power within African countries, reconfiguring political boundaries, and prompting new approaches to the study of politics and international relations.

Boone’s research focuses on comparative political economy, with an emphasis on institutions and the political and economic geography of state-building in African countries. She is the author of Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (2024), Property and Political Order: Land Rights and the Structure of Conflict in Africa (2014), Political Topographies of the African State (2003), and Merchant Capital and the Roots of State Power in Senegal (1993). She was elected to the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.