Professor Doro, Lucy Marsh Haskell '19 Professor Emeritus of Government, passed away in January, 2015. She was with Connecticut College from 1962 to 1998.
She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from Florida State University and her doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania.
Professor Doro's experience in East Africa as a Ford Fellow and a Fulbright lecturer at Makerere University in Uganda made it possible for her to begin teaching the first courses on Africa at Connecticut College. Her courses on "Politics in Africa," "Politics in Southern Africa," and the advanced seminars "Post Apartheid South Africa" and "Racism and Ethnicity in Africa" were taught from the perspective that it is increasingly important for students to have living and learning experiences in technologically less developed countries because the fate of these states will significantly influence their lives in the 21st century.
As founding director of the College's Study Abroad Teach Abroad program (SATA), she inaugurated the program at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Doro took an intensive course in Kiswahili with the students who participated in the program and taught Politics in Industrial Societies in the Department of Political Science. She served as a UN Monitor in Tanzania's first multi-party elections in 1995 and had Observer Status for the Parliamentary election in Uganda in 1996. Her special research interests are focused on the democratization process in Africa, with special emphasis on the role of women in civil society and the question of "free and fair" elections. Much of this is reflected in her survey of the literature of democratization, which was published in CHOICE, the journal of the American Library Association, which is widely used by reference librarians. Most recently, she was compiling an annotated bibliography on the Democratization Process in Africa.
Doro's first book, Governing in Black Africa: Perspectives on New States (1986) has been cited as one of the ten most significant contributions to the field of African politics. She also authored a reader in African politics, and a historiographic study Rhodesia/Zimbabwe: A Bibliographic Guide to the Nationalist Period (1984). She published numerous bibliographic essays for Current Bibliography on African politics, several dozen articles on various African states for Colliers Yearbook, and over 100 book reviews.
She taught and conducted research in East and Southern Africa frequently, particularly in Uganda at Makerere University, as a Senior Associate in the Institute for Social Science and twice as a Fulbright scholar, in 1963/64 and 1997/98. She also served as a USIS Visiting Lecturer in Ethiopia, Mozambique and Nigeria. Listed in several Who's Who, was been active in the African Studies Association and several regional professional associations, served as editor of the AFRICA CONTEMPORARY RECORD, was a Fellow of the Royal African Society (London), and was a member of several honor societies: Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi and Pi Sigma Alpha.
A funeral service for Marion was held on Tuesday, January 20, 2015, in Harkness Chapel, Connecticut College.