Andrew Apter is Professor of History and Anthropology at UCLA, where he directs the James S. Coleman African Studies Center and co-organizes the Atlantic History Colloquium. His books include Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society (1992); The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (2005) which received the 2007 Amaury Talbot Prize awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute; Beyond Words: Discourse and Critical Agency in Africa (2007), and Oduduwa’s Chain: Locations of Culture in the Yoruba Atlantic (2018), all with the University of Chicago Press. He also co-edited Activating the Past: History and Memory in the Black Atlantic World (2010) with Lauren Derby. He is currently working on History in the Dungeon: Atlantic Slavery and the Spirits of Capitalism, a study— supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship—that reveals how Atlantic slavery and its fetishized forms of alienated labor remain deeply buried within the core of modern capitalism.
Apter received one BA in philosophy (Yale, ‘78) and another in social anthropology (Cambridge University, ‘82) before completing his PhD in anthropology (Yale, ‘87). While an undergraduate and graduate student at Yale, he played violin in the School of Music’s Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of the late Maestro Otto-Werner Mueller, and played two summer seasons of the Spoleto Festival in Italy. He and his wife (Robin Derby) have lived in Santa Monica since 2002, and all three of their sons went through Grant Elementary, JAMS, and SAMOHI where they played in band and jazz ensembles.