This section includes key reference databases and books (encyclopedias, bibliographies, general histories, and more) to help you get started with your research in African Studies and find accurate background information.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) of African History offer synopses of key historical topics and themes throughout the African continent. Each encyclopedia article includes overview information, a discussion of the scholarly literature, a list of key primary sources, links to digital resources, and suggestions for further reading.
Oxford Bibliographies offers expert-curated guides to the most important and significant sources in distinct facets of Atlantic History, with editorial commentary to show how the cited sources are interrelated.
The Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) of Politics offer synopses of key topics and themes in a wide range of subjects: contentious politics and political violence; governance and political change; groups and identities; history and politics; international political economy; policy and administration; politics and law; postmodern and critical politics; public opinion; world politics; quantitative and qualitative methodologies; and political anthropology, behavior, communication, economy, institutions, philosophy, psychology sociology, and values and ideologies.
Oxford University Press has partnered with the International Studies Association (ISA) on the Oxford Research Encyclopedia (ORE) of International Studies. Articles cover a wide range of subjects: conflict studies, development, diplomacy, environment, ethics, foreign policy, human rights, identity, international law, international relations theory, pedagogy, gender and sexuality, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and political communication, economy, geography, and sociology.
Part of Oxford Academic, each handbook takes an aspect of its discipline and unpacks it, explaining the key issues, the classic and contemporary debates on those issues, and setting the agenda for how those debates might evolve. Introductory and yet sophisticated, the handbooks offer authoritative and trustworthy guides to the scholarship that defines the field.
Access to full text of titles published by Oxford Scholarship Online for the following collections and updates: Archaeology (Sept. & Nov. 2012); Business & Management (Sept. 2009, May 2010); Classics (current through 2016); History (current through 2016); Economics & Finance (current through 2016); Linguistics (current through 2016); Music (current thru 2021); Philosophy (current through 2016); Political Science (Sept. 2009, Jan. & May 2010, Jan. 2011, May 2011); Religion (Sept. 2009, Jan. 2010, Jan. & May 2011)
Published in 2021, this comprehensive encyclopedia presents African thinkers, concepts and traditions, with a focus on African religious and philosophical practices. It offers a dependable and significant synthesis of African studies that encompasses major trends in the field since the early 1980s. The encyclopedia considers all religious and philosophical systems of Africa, both indigenous and non-indigenous. It also recognizes the determining role of the Diaspora in understanding African traditions and African identity.
Published in 2009, the Encyclopedia of African Religion includes nearly 500 entries on such topics as deities and divinities, the nature of humanity, the end of life, the conquest of fear, and the quest for attainment of harmony with nature and other humans.
Written especially for students, this book selectively surveys the topic in a clear and accessible way. Included are roughly 600 alphabetically arranged entries on writers, genres, and major works. Many entries cite works for further reading, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.
The Black Women Radicals Database (BWRD) historizes and visualizes Black women’s radical political activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora in efforts to build academic, political, and community engagement, dialogue, knowledge production, research, and education about Black women’s significant legacies as socio-political agents of radical change.
