Thomas F. McDow is a historian of Africa and the Indian World at the Ohio State University. He is the author of Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean, a study of how credit, mobility, and kinship knit together a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region in the nineteenth century. He teaches courses in African, Indian Ocean, and World History. He also co-developed and co-teaches a set of interdisciplinary courses on HIV/AIDS at the intersection of humanities and sciences.