Robert Oakley Collins (1933 – 2008) was an American historian of East Africa and Sudan. He published numerous articles and thirty-five books, including Shadows in the Grass: Britain in the Southern Sudan (Yale, 1983), which was awarded the John Ben Snow Foundation prize for the best book in British History and the Social Sciences written by a North American. He worked as an adviser for Southern Sudan's High Executive Council (HEC) Regional Government in the early 1970s, Chevron Overseas Petroleum in 1981-1991, and the US Government. Collins authored many background papers on Sudan and the Middle East aimed at policymakers and, in 1981, he testified before the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. In 1980 he was awarded the Order of Sciences, Arts and Art, Gold Class, by Gaafar Nimeiry, the President of Sudan, for his long service to scholarship on the Upper Nile. Robert O. Collins was Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1965 to 1994. Among a wider public, he is probably best known for a book co-authored with J. Millard Burr, Alms for Jihad: Charity and Terrorism in the Islamic World (CUP, 2006). In 2007, to avoid a libel suit from the Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, Cambridge University Press agreed to remove Alms for Jihad from circulation in British libraries and to destroy existing copies. Biography Early life and education Robert O. Collins was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1933. His father, William George Collins, was a ceramics engineer and worked for Johns Manville. His mother, Louise Van Horsen Jack, was a nurse. Robert's elder brother, Jack Gore Collins (1930-2010), was Assistant Attorney for the United States Department of Justice in Portland, Oregon. His younger brother, George William Collins II (1937-2013), was an astronomer who taught at Ohio State University and, later, Case Western Reserve University. Robert entered Dartmouth College in 1950, where he developed an interest in African history while browsing in the library there. In 1954, he completed his senior history thesis, Emin Pasha in Equatoria, 1876-1889, and won a Marshall Scholarship for study at Oxford University. In 1955, while a Masters student at Balliol College, Oxford, he obtained a research grant from the Ford Foundation, which enabled him to undertake work on his thesis on the Equatoria Province. He first traveled to Sudan in 1956, arriving a few months after the county's independence, to carry out research