Professor Higgs is a scholar of modern African history, and has traveled widely in Africa and Europe. Her books include The Ghost of Equality: The Public Lives of D.D.T. Jabavu of South Africa, 1885-1959 (1997), and with Barbara A. Moss and Earline Rae Ferguson, Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas (2002). Her new monograph, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, was published by Ohio University Press in May 2012. Written for a broad audience, Chocolate Islands is a narrative history that traces the African journey of Joseph Burtt, who was hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers to determine if it was purchasing—as critics claimed—slave-produced cocoa from the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe. Burtt traveled to the islands, and to Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. Chocolate Islands explores the competing meanings of the dignity of labor in colonial Africa, and reveals the idealism, naivety, and racism that shaped attitudes toward Africa, even among those who sought to improve the conditions of its workers. Professor Higgs recently completed the research for her planned third monograph, Sisters for Justice: Religion and Activism in Apartheid South Africa, and spent the 2012-2013 academic year as a residential fellow at the National Humanities Center where she began writing the manuscript. Sisters for Justice examines Catholic religious sisters as citizen activists who confronted the segregationist state and who by their actions, helped contribute to its dismantling. It is a historical analysis of how soft diplomacy and local measures by minor religious actors can help transform national policy.