Trevor R. Getz is a History Professor at San Francisco State University. His primary academic focus is world history, with a specialization in the social history of Africa. He is an award-winning author, academic, and filmmaker. Aside from Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History, Getz wrote Empires and Colonies in the Modern World and many academic essays published by Oxford University Press and Duke University Press among others. Getz attended the University of California and earned his Bachelor of Arts in History and Anthropology in 1995. Later, in 1997, he went on to earn a Master of Arts in History from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2000, he earned his Doctorate of Philosophy in History from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Getz’s first book, Slavery and Reform in West Africa: Toward Emancipation in Nineteenth-Century Senegal and the Gold Coast, was published in 2004 and focuses on his core areas of study, the same areas addressed in Abina and the Important Men: the relationship between emancipation and slavery, and the sociopolitical dynamics in what is now presently known as Ghana and South Africa.