Robert O. Collins | |
|---|---|
| Born | Robert Oakley Collins April 1, 1933 Waukegan, Illinois |
| Died | April 11, 2008 (aged 75) Santa Barbara, California |
| Nationality | U.S. American |
| Occupation | Historian |
Robert Oakley Collins (April 1, 1933 – April 11, 2008) was an American historian of East Africa and Sudan. He published numerous articles and thirty-five books, including Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan (Yale, 1983), which was awarded the John Ben Snow Foundation prize for the best book in British History and the Social Sciences written by a North American. He worked as an adviser for Southern Sudan's High Executive Council (HEC) Regional Government in the early 1970s, Chevron Overseas Petroleum in 1981 to 1991,[note 1] and the US Government.[1] Collins authored many background papers on Sudan and the Middle East aimed at policymakers and, in 1981, he testified before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs.[1][2][note 2] In 1980 he was awarded the Order of Sciences, Arts and Art, Gold Class, by Gaafar Nimeiry, the President of Sudan, for his long service to scholarship on the Upper Nile.[3]
Robert O. Collins was Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1965 to 1994.[4] Among a wider public, he is probably best known for a book co-authored with J. Millard Burr, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World (CUP, 2006). In 2007, to avoid a libel suit from the Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, Cambridge University Press agreed to remove Alms for Jihad from circulation in British libraries and to destroy existing copies.[5]
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