Austen, Ralph A.

found: His African economic history, 1987:CIP t.p. (Ralph A. Austen; prof. of African hist., Univ. of Chicago)

found: Viewing African cinema in the twenty-first century, 2010:ECIP t.p. (Ralph A. Austen) data view (professor emeritus of African history at the University of Chicago)

found: Digital dissertations, Nov. 30, 2010(Austen, Ralph Albert, Ph. D., Harvard University, 1966--Native policy and African politics)

found: Hyde Park Herald (online), Ralph Austen, voracious scholar with a playful imagination, dies at 87, August 26, 2024, viewed September 28, 2024(Ralph Albert Austen, born on January 9, 1937 in Leipzig, Germany; his father, Norbert Hans Oesterreicher, changed their last name to Austen in the United States; the family left Germany when Ralph was two, lived for a year in Sweden, and made it to New York in 1940; accepted at Harvard, then earned M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. back at Harvard; assistant history professor at New York University in 1966 when he met his future wife, Ernestine Stotter; joined the history department of the University of Chicago in 1967; founding member there of the African Studies Workshop; helped rescue the M.A. Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) when it was at risk of being eliminated in the 1980s; spoke German, French, Spanish, Douala, Swahili, Hebrew and some Yiddish; joined the University of Chicago Hillel and later Hyde Park's KAM Isaiah Israel; had a second bar mitzvah at age 83; volunteered at KAM and at the Hyde Park Refugee Project) - https://www.hpherald.com/obituaries/ralph-austen-voracious-scholar-with-a-playful-imagination-dies-at-87/article_b59b02b0-63d9-11ef-a421-cfa5d2c10401.html

found: African Studies Association website, Ralph A. Austen (1937-2024), viewed September 28, 2024(Ralph Austen, Professor Emeritus of History, African Studies, and the College at The University of Chicago, passed away on Friday, August 23; arrived at the University of Chicago as an Assistant Professor in 1967, the first tenure-line historian of Africa hired there; did research on colonization in German and British East africa, Duala peoples in Cameroon, trade in enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, the Sahara and the Red Sea, and other subjects typically the domain of ethnographers and folklorists, such as epic traditions including Sundiata, credited with founding the Mali Empire; several of his later research projects had to do with Amadou Hampâté Bâ; he spoke and read German and French fluently; member of the Mande Studies Association) - https://africanstudies.org/in-memory/ralph-a-austen-1937-2024/