Charlie Piot, Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies, does research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999), attempted to re-theorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and global. His next book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War (2010), explored shifts in Togolese political culture during the 1990s, a time when the NGOs and charismatic churches took over the bio-political, reorganizing social and political life in the absence of the state.  A forthcoming book (2019), The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles, is on Togolese who apply for and attempt to game the US Diversity Visa Lottery.  He has begun research on a project focusing on the return of Togolese in the diaspora to West Africa.