He earned his M.A and Ph.D. in History at UCLA, where he researched French colonial rule in Islamic West Africa. He received a NDEA Title IV grant to study Bambara, 1980-1983, as well as two Fulbright Research Fellowships to conduct field research in Senegal and Mali, 1983-1984 and 1990-1991. He was co-writer and Principal Investigator of a NDEA Title VI grant to internationalize the curriculum at PSU, 1999-2002. He has published recently on Democratization in Mali and on Islamic radicalism in North and West Africa. He has completed a year or more of formal study of seven foreign languages, and has lived and worked on five different continents. Prior to coming to PSU, Dr. Harmon taught at Arkansas State University and SUNY-Oswego in New York. His hobbies are world travel and fly fishing.