Alemneh Dejene

Alemneh Dejene, 1974

B.A., Denison University
M.A., University of Virginia
Ph.D., Cornell University




Citation awarded May, 1989

Alemneh Dejene received his masters from the University of Virginia in 1976 and his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1980. He then served as assistant professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1983 he was appointed as a fellow at the Harvard Institute for International Development and in 1984 received the appointment of post-doctoral fellow. In 1987, Alemneh was appointed a research fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for research on the Ethiopian famine from the ecological perspective.

He published a book in 1987 entitled Peasants, Agrarian Socialism, and Rural Development in Ethiopia. “It is one of the few systematic field surveys undertaken following the 1975 agrarian reform in Ethiopia analyzing the conditions constraining agricultural productivity of peasant farmers in the Arsi region and examining how farmers view peasant and government organizations established to attain agrarian socialism.”

A native of Ethiopia, Alemneh has one brother who has graduated from Denison and another who is currently a student.