Catherine Higgs, associate professor of history, is an expert on African history. Her new book about Portuguese Africa, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, will be published by Ohio University Press on May 28. Furthermore, she has recently been awarded a prestigious year-long fellowship at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, where she will spend the coming academic year working on her new book project, “Sisters for Justice: Religion and Political Transformation in Apartheid South Africa,” a project for which she has done nearly 100 oral history interviews as well as detailed archival research in South Africa over the last several years.