Edna Bay is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA. Trained as a historian of Africa, she is best known for her work on gender in Africa, including Wives of the Leopard; Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (University Press of Virginia, 1998) and her edited volume Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford Univ. Press, 1976).

She has recently begun to do comparative work on gender and religion in the Black Atlantic world, and has
edited a volume entitled Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil (Frank Cass, 2001). In spring semester 2001, she was in residence at the Centre for Gender and Development Studies at UWI Mona as a Fulbright researcher/lecturer. In conjunction with CGDS, she has been funded by the Fulbright Commission for a linkage project between Emory University's Institute for Women's Studies and CGDS to be implemented in 2003-05.