Sandra Elaine Greene  Sandra Elaine Greene is an historian of West Africa and professor. She is Stephen '59 and Madeline '60 Anbinder Professor of African History and Chair of the History Department at Cornell University. Greene grew up in southwestern Ohio; her interest in education was encouraged by her mother, an elementary school teacher. Greene expected to study medicine, but found herself drawn to textual analysis as an undergraduate and ultimately majored in philosophy at Kalamazoo College. She also studied abroad in University of Ghana, Legon via a program that had influenced her choice to enroll at Kalamazoo, then one of the only colleges in the U.S. to offer study abroad in Africa. Her study abroad experience as well as the late Civil Rights Movement and rising Black Power movement on-going while she was an undergraduate in the late 1960s and early 1970s confirmed Greene's decision to pursue African history for her graduate work.