The upcoming campus visit of Archbishop Desmond Tutu has Thom McClendon especially busy these days. As Southwestern's resident expert on African history, he is charged with helping the University prepare for the March 26 Shilling Lecture on "Peace and Reconciliation." Having already taken part in a faculty panel last month, he will lead a March 22nd Faculty Forum on apartheid.

"I'm tremendously excited about Archbishop Tutu's upcoming lecture," he says. "He is a towering figure in the recent history of South Africa and certainly one of the anti-apartheid leaders who caught my attention in the mid-1980s. He is also a powerful speaker. I'm really looking forward to hearing his talk as well as to meeting him."

Besides McClendon's preparatory work for Tutu's visit, this semester he chairs the Humanities Division, is working with the Feminist Studies Program to coordinate the 2004 Jessie Daniel Ames Lecture, "Too Tall Blondes do Sex, Death and Gender," on March 4 and serves on faculty search committees in history, religion and French. vTwenty years ago, McClendon would have laughed at the notion that he would one day teach African history at a liberal arts college in Texas. At the time, the California native and Berkeley law school graduate was an attorney working for a large firm in San Francisco. "I worked on all kinds of litigation from admiralty to antitrust, but basically I served as a research assistant to the partners. I found it to be a very alienating environment."

In 1986, dissatisfied with his chosen profession and fascinated by the political situation in South Africa, he decided to take a year to travel in Africa. "I went there during the South African State of Emergency, the height of the anti-apartheid struggle. I began reading South African history, and at some point I concluded that I would go back to graduate school to study African history." vHe went on to earn his master's and Ph.D. at Stanford University. He spent another 18 months in South Africa during 1991-92 researching his dissertation, which would later turn into the book, "Genders and Generations Apart: Labor Tenants and Customary Law in Segregation-Era South Africa, 1920s to 1940s," combining his interests in law and history.

He taught briefly at UCLA and Cal-Berkeley before moving to Georgetown with his spouse, Nancy, and joining Southwestern's faculty in 1998. "I felt the same sense of community at Southwestern as I did at Pomona College, where I did my undergraduate work. A small liberal arts institution like this offers wonderful mentorship possibilities between faculty and students." The tuition benefit enabled Nancy to earn a teaching certificate at SU, and she now works at Georgetown's Community Montessori School.

McClendon's courses on African and African-American history emphasize the concerns with colonialism, gender and generation, race and law reflected in his research. "My research provides much of the excitement in my teaching, gives students the most current ideas and helps them in their own research.

"And turning it around, teaching also stimulates my research by raising questions that I hope to answer. I feel teaching and research are absolutely linked." With the aid of a Cullen Grant, he will return to South Africa this May to do research for a new book project on colonialism in South Africa. He looks forward to furthering that project during a spring 2005 sabbatical.