Neal Sobania ’68

Neal Sobania ’68 of Lakewood, Washington, is co-author, with longtime scholarly collaborator Dr. Raymond Silverman, of the book Ethiopian Church Art: Painters, Patrons, Purveyors. The image-rich study chronicles a tradition that has been part of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity for more than 1,500 years. It is based on research they conducted for 25 years in the northern Ethiopian town of Aksum and in Addis Ababa working with
more than 200 individuals. Neal was director of international education and a member of the history faculty at Hope from 1981 to 2005. He was subsequently at Pacific Lutheran University, where he was executive director of the Wang Center for Global Education and a professor of history, retiring in 2016. Through the years, he has donated to the college’s
Kruizenga Art Museum more than 1,000 pieces of art and cultural objects that he has collected across the course of his career, including more than 700 that are Ethiopianrelated; the museum exhibited 67 of the latter in an exhibition in the fall of 2018. Neal, at right, is shown presenting personal copies of the book to collections manager Andie Near and museum curator Charles Mason.

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