I am a graduate of the University of Cape Town (first degree and first postgraduate degree, 1980-83) and holder of a Masters and a doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. I held a temporary lectureship in Comparative Politics at the University of Keele in 1987/88, before taking up a Lectureship in African History at Edinburgh. I was promoted to Reader in 2003 and Professor in 2005. I was the Director of the Centre of African Studies for ten years and was formerly co-Director of the Edinburgh International Development Centre.Externally, I was the President of AEGIS, the Centre-based African Studies association in Europe between 2008 and 2015, As such, I have been intimately involved in the European African Studies scene. In 2014/15, I was a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS) working on a project on South African wine and global connectivity. Over 2015/16, I was privileged to be a Member of the Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, working on a comparison of borders and state-making in Ghana and Uganda.I am the holder of the most prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant (€2.5 million over 5 years) for a multi-regional comparative project entitled African Governance and Space: Transport Corridors, Border Towns and Port Cities in Transition (AFRIGOS). The project began in January 2016 and ends in 2020. See http://www.cas.ed.ac.uk/research/grants_and_projects/afrigosI am also the PI for a new collaborative project funded by the British Academy, on Border Festivals, Dvided Communities and Practical Governance in West Africa. This is a collaboration with colleagues in Edinburgh (Jose-Maria Muñoz), the University of Ghana (Ntewusu Aniegye and Edem Adotey), l'Université de Lomé (Kokou Azamede), the University of Cagliari (Isabella Soi) and George Washington University (Elaine Peña).