PROGRAM OF AFRICAN STUDIES

Graduate Students

New GradUATE Students

Jacob Adesina (history)

• Jacob Adesina has a BA in history and international studies from the University of Osun and an MA in history from the University of Ibadan. His research interests include music, statecraft, slavery, abolition, and postcolonial African societies. He holds a Mellon Foundation Fellowship in African Studies awarded by The Graduate School at Northwestern University.

Esther Osei Adjei (history)

• Esther Osei Adjei has a BEd with a major in history from the University of Cape Coast. Her research focus centers on the religion and architecture of the people of the South-Central Ghana. She was a member of the debate team of the Religion Department (UCC) and won several awards. Esther is enthusiastic about youth education especially the girl child. Prior to graduate school, Esther taught history at a private secondary school in Ghana.

David Jones (art history)

• David Jones is a PhD student in art history. His research interest is the history and theory of photography as it relates to the African diaspora. His research focuses on the entanglement between landscape, western expansion, fugitivity, and displacement in nineteenth-century and contemporary lens-based practices. David received his master’s degree in art history at York University in Toronto in 2022. His master’s thesis examined the relationship between sight and sound in photographs produced by the Black photographers of California during the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. Before starting the art history program at Northwestern, David was an assistant exhibition and project coordinator at Wedge Curatorial Projects in Toronto. His critical writing can be found in The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Archive and tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture. His recent curatorial collaboration includes a virtual viewing at the Brooklyn Museum for Ebony Haynes’s “Black Art Sessions.”

Racheal Bolakale Oyundoyin (anthropology)

• Racheal Bolakale Oyundoyin is a Ph.D. student in anthropology. She got her B.Sc. in archaeology from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and her MA in anthropology from Mississippi State University. Her Master's thesis was a pilot study of organic residues on ceramics from the Early Iron Age (ca. 400 B.C.-A.D. 40) of Bara in southwest Nigeria. For her doctoral research, Racheal plans to shed light on the complex interplay between food, culture, and society in Old Oyo over the past 3000 years, using paleoethnobotanical analysis and organic residue analysis of ceramics. She is a member of the study groups on the History of Food and Foodways in Western Lower Niger since 400 BC and The Chemistry of History: Technology, Mobility, and Trade in West Africa, 400 BC-AD 1830 in the Material History Lab.

Kate Rhoda Yaa Nkrumah (comparative literature)

• Kate Rhoda Yaa Nkrumah is a first-year graduate student in comparative literature. She has two Bachelor's degrees from Howard University. As a first-generation Ghanaian American woman, Nkrumah's interest in international affairs is committed to the advancement of African women's social, political, and economic liberation. At Howard, she was an active member of the African Student Association, the Muslim Student Association, and Ujima First, a community-oriented collective that aims to feed and politically empower the Black community in Washington, DC. She also served as a staff writer for The Liberato, Howard's political review. She aspires to work as a foreign correspondent specializing in conflict, migration, and violations of women's rights across sub-Saharan Africa and the MENA region. Nkrumah is enthusiastic about African cultural expression through literature, oral performance, art and song, dance, and fashion. At Northwestern, she intends to focus on African women's Islamic literature, exploring how women use Islam and literary spheres to express their spiritual devotion and reclaim their agency.

SabriAnan Micha (anthropology)

• SabriAnan Micha is a first-year student in cultural anthropology interested in exploring issues of survival, belonging, and identity formation amongst Black Queer and Trans people in the American South and the East African Diaspora.

Ifeayin Eziamaka Ogbuli (history)

• Ifeayin Eziamaka "Ezi" Ogbuli has a BA in global studies and an MPH from the University of Southern California. Her research interests focus on the interplay between human rights and history of colonized societies and peoples, particularly the transformation of rights claims between the colonized and colonizer and their implication on colonial resistance.

Returning Graduate Students

Semiu Adegbenle (History)

• Semiu Adegbenle is a first-year student in the Department of History. His research interests are African economic and diasporic history. He holds a MA from the University of Ibadan, where his master’s thesis explored the Togolese and Beninoise diaspora in Ejigbo, southwestern Nigeria.
  

Brandon Alston (Sociology)

• Brandon Alston’s major areas of interest are: masculinities, race and ethnicity, identity formation, African American and Africana studies, and religion.

Xena Amro (Comparative Literary Studies)

• Xena Amro has been admitted to the CLS PhD program with a home department in the Middle East and North African Studies (MENA) program. Her research interests include travelogues, global modernism, translation studies, modern Arabic literature, and twentieth-century European novels.

Sasha Artamonova (Art History)

• Sasha is a doctoral student studying modern and contemporary African-American and African Diaspora art at the Department of Art History at Northwestern University. She is particularly interested in the artistic exchange between African-American & African socialist artists and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. She graduated in 2012 with a Specialist Diploma from the Sociology Department at the Russian State University for the Humanities. In August 2019, Sasha received her MA in North American Studies from the John F. Kennedy Institute at Freie Universität in Berlin. Her thesis, The Representation of Black Romance in the Painting Series “Vignettes” by Kerry James Marshall, examined the history of visual representation of Black romance in European and North American visual culture. Specifically, Sasha’s research focused on the way Kerry James Marshall created a new canonical representation of Black heterosexual love in his on-going painting series “Vignettes.” Prior to her current studies, Sasha spent two years working in advertising and at the Educational Department of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Currently, she is a freelance contributor to the research project Art Market Dictionary for the German academic publishing house De Gruyter.

Tarek Adam Benchouia (Performance Studies)

• Tarek Benchouia's research interests focus on the culture and politics of Mahraganat, a contemporary and emergent genre of music in Egypt.

Eddine Nabil Bouyahi (Political Science)

• Eddine Nabil Bouyahi’s research is about the effects of land reforms on social structure in the countryside in Southern Africa, how these policies transform the relationship between the state and the elites in these areas, and the specific politic demands of the populations living there.

Alison Ann Boyd (Art History)

• Alison Boyd studies the arts of the African diaspora and feminist art history. She is a Mellon Fellow in Northwestern’s gender and sexuality studies cluster. Her dissertation is titled “Modernism for America: Africanism and other Primitivisms at the Barnes Foundation 1919-1951.” She argues that Philadelphia art collector Albert Barnes used primitivism—first in relation to African sculpture and African American music and, later, Native American and Pennsylvania German art—to recontextualize his collection of modern art into displays that were uniquely relevant to his vision of the United States.

Rashayla Marie Brown (Performance Studies)

• Rashayla Marie Brown (RMB) is an interdisciplinary artist working across an extensive list of cultural production modes, including photography, performance, writing, drawing, installation, and video art. Her research interests are decolonization of the art historical canon, religious studies, postcolonial theory, queer studies, cultural studies, the intersections of avant-garde performance art and popular culture, and modernism in visual art.

Austin Bryan (Anthropology)

• Austin Bryan is a Cultural Anthropology PhD student at Northwestern University and a Research Fellow at Sexual Minorities Uganda in Kampala, Uganda. In Kampala he is completing an ethnographic study on the daily lives of kuchus (LGBT) persons.

Issrar Chamekh (Political Science)

• Issrar is interested in the Maghreb with an eye on the Mediterranean region in general. Issrar researches clientelism and how it influences social movements, as well as the dynamics of change and continuity. Issrar also looks at women in politics, politics of memory, and post-colonialism.

Raja Ben Hammed Dorval (French)

• Raja Ben Hammed Dorval received her BA from the University of Tunis and her Master’s from Manouba University in linguistics and language policy. She is interested in pursuing comparative work on Maghrebian and African Francophone literatures regarding questions of the liminal space occupied by immigrant identities and imaginaries. In the context of North African literature, she is also interested in exploring the relations/tensions between the Francophone postcolonial tradition and Arabic literary production in the region.

Sarah Dwider (Art History)

• Sarah Dwider is a doctoral student working on 20th century art from the Middle East with a focus on modern art in Egypt. Her research interests include Cold War-era cultural diplomacy and state cultural policy, social realism in the Arab world, and the role of Middle Eastern artists within transnational and transregional networks of exchange, particularly between Socialist states.

Mitchell Edwards (History)

• Mitch Edwards is a doctoral student focusing on social histories of refugee mobility within twentieth-century East Africa. His research interests revolve around historical displacement in a way that privileges the everyday influence of transnational networks, state-specific governance, and distinct cultures on people living outside their presumed homelands. He is a fellow of the interdisciplinary African Studies Cluster.

Fortunate Kelechi Ekwuruke (Human Development and Social Policy)

• Fortunate Kelechi Ekwuruke is an interdisciplinary researcher pursuing her doctoral studies in Human Development and Social Policy.  Her research examines issues related to adolescent development, housing insecurity, and education in Nigeria. Her current dissertation work features three studies: the role of slum evictions on adolescent development, the educational experiences of adolescents in correctional facilities, and the design and implementation of educational programs for nontraditional students, specifically those who have aged out of the normative education pathway. Fortunate’s work seeks to contribute to literature on African adolescents, centering their experiences and perspectives towards understanding the issues that affect them and driving sustainable solutions.

Nora Gavin-Smyth (Plant Biology and Conservation)

• Regions with extraordinary patterns of biodiversity such as the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania are invaluable systems for studying evolution and the processes that accumulate and maintain biodiversity. The geographic distribution of species in light of genetic relationships among populations, the field known as phylogeography, can help us to understand some of these evolutionary processes and provide key information for conservation. My PhD research explores phylogeography at the population level and at the systematic level in the plant genus Impatiens (family Balsaminaceae), commonly called “touch-me-nots.”

Esther Ginestet (History)                                           

• Esther Ginestet is a doctoral student in the Department of History. Prior to attending Northwestern University, she undertook her graduate and undergraduate studies at SciencesPo University in Paris as well as the University of Nairobi (as an exchange student). She completed a M.A. in History from SciencesPo and defended a master's thesis about the history of race, ethnicity and nation-building in postcolonial Uganda. Her broader research interests include African history (with a focus on East African history), colonial and postcolonial history, ethnicity, identity-making dynamics, migrations, migration control, nationalism and state-building processes.

Melina Gooray (Art History)

• Melina Gooray is an arts educator and youth advocate who is invested in working in Afrocentric feminist spaces with her own community of womxn and girls of the African Diaspora.  She has over seven years experience working in various capacities at the interface of museum and community for a number of cultural institutions across the country including the Owens-Thomas House and Slave Quarters in Savannah, GA, The Art, Design, and Architecture Museum UCSB, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is currently a Special Projects Fellow at the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia where she authors curriculum for youth programs and co-leads the development of a VR museum. In addition, she is a PhD student in Art History at Northwestern, where she researches liberatory pedagogical strategies of contemporary black female artists and art educators. As a researcher, Melina is committed to the vital importance of uncovering and (co)authoring the history of the communities she inhabits. She endeavors to make her scholarship relevant to her communities. In this light, she wrote her master's thesis, "Concrete Under the Guyanese Sun", on shifts in material practices in domestic vernacular architecture in her parents' hometown, Essequibo, Guyana.

Olabanke Goriola (Performance Studies)

• Olabanke Oyinkansola Goriola (She/Her) is an interdisciplinary scholar, performer, researcher, trained dancer, hairstylist, and dance anthropologist from Nigeria. She received her Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Theatre Arts from the University of Ibadan in 2016 and a dance certificate from The Dance Deal Training Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria. Olabanke obtained an Erasmus Mundus International Master of Arts (MA) in Choreomundus: Anthropology of Dance from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Norway); University Clermont Auvergne (UCA, France); University of Szeged (SZTE, Hungary) and University of Roehampton (UR, The United Kingdom) in 2020. She also studied at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, under the Kirby Laing Foundation Scholarship, where she received a Master of Science by Research (MScR) in the Study of Religion in 2021. Olabanke’s previous research has explored how the Afro-Brazilian Candomble Orishas’ personality traits are visible through the dances of the Orishas. She investigated the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on the Afro-Brazilian Candomble religion and how the adherents are devising new methods to keep the religion alive. Drawing from the politics of religion, anthropology, dance and performance, her current research aims to identify and analyze the explicit and implicit sacrifices dark-skinned female performers offer to comply with industry standards and the dynamics of colorism manifesting in these standards. Also, she intends to explore how colorism influences the mental belief of dark-skinned female performers. Olabanke’s areas of research include Dance studies, Ritual studies, African/Diasporic Religion, Music and Dance, Gender and Sexuality studies, Black Feminist theories and performances, Dance Anthropology and Ethnochoreology, Media Studies, Dance Movement Therapy, Media and Film Studies, Cultural studies, and the use of technology such as motion capture to explore dance and movement.

Brandon Greenhouse (Theater)

• Brandon’s research interest is in the relationship of African oral storytelling traditions to contemporary African American theatre.

Rachel Grimm (French and Italian)

• Rachel's research interests include postcolonial North Africa, identity politics in France, gender as a way of signifying relationships of power, and Arabic.

Sorenie Gudissa (economics)

• Rachel's research interests include postcolonial North Africa, identity politics in France, gender as a way of signifying relationships of power, and Arabic and English.

Bethany Hill (Art History)

• Bethany is a PhD student studying contemporary art with a particular emphasis on black feminist and queer approaches to visual culture. She is especially interested in scholarship and artists that put pressure on the structures by which we determine subjecthood, agency, and self-representation. She received her BA in the History of Art at Elon University, where she wrote her senior thesis on how the sculpture Contact, by artist Nandipha Mntambo, performed race and gender during its display at the National Museum of African Art. While at Elon she also received the prestigious Lumen Prize research award which supported two years of investigating the role of gender and performative gesture in medieval German sculpture. Bethany presented this work at the 50th International Congress of Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo.

Emily Kamm (History)

• Emily Kamm is a first-year doctoral student in the History Department, studying the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her research interests focus on transatlantic connections between West Central Africa and Latin America, with particular emphasis on environmental history and epistemologies of the natural world. Prior to coming to Northwestern University, Emily lived for ten years in Portland, Oregon. While there she earned a B.A. with Honors in History from Portland State University. Her undergraduate research was supported by the History Department's Lauren Banasky Memorial Grant, typically awarded only to graduate students. Most recently, she served as the program developer for an Oregon Department of Justice grant to integrate domestic violence services into an Oregon Health Sciences University primary care clinic.

Emmanuel Elikplim Kuto (Anthropology)

• Emmanuel Elikplim Kuto joins the Department of Anthropology. He is a Ghanaian who trained at the University of Ghana-Legon. He participated in the 7th Ife-Sungbo Campaign in 2022 and worked with Amanda Logan.

Behailu Shiferaw Mihirete (Communication Studies)

• Behailu Shiferaw Mihirete joins the Department of Communication Studies. He has 14 years of experience in media and communications in Ethiopia and East Africa. Most recently, Behailu had a work placement at the BBC Media Action, London, during which time he contributed to the feasibility study for the International Fund for Public Interest Media and worked on PRIMED project development. While in the UK, he was also a Chevening Scholar studying politics and communication at the London School of Economics. Before that, Behailu worked in Ethiopia as a Voices from the Field/Communications specialist for WaterAid, focused on producing strategic media content for the organization’s international fundraising and advocacy purposes. He also led communication for nonprofits training in Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Nigeria, and the UK and worked for the Children’s Radio Foundation and UNICEF.

Michell Miller (Performance Studies)

• Michell Nicole Miller holds an A.M. in Theater and Performance Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. She received a B.A. in English Language and Literature with a concentration in Poetry Writing from the University of Virginia. Michell’s research interests include: the black female body, birth justice, traditional birthing practices, black midwifery, Afro-Diasporic ritual and performances of the feminine divine.

Noran Mohamed (French and Italian)

• Noran Mohamed is interested in the connections between French and Arabic. Her academic interests include postcolonialism, Orientalism, exoticism, and neuro/sociolinguistics.

Shelby Mohrs (Anthropology)

• Shelby is an archaeology student whose research uses paleoethnobotanical techniques to study how and what people in the past were eating and their everyday lives. Her current research focuses on the historical foodways of city-states of the Swahili Coast. Other research interests include ethnoarchaeology and political ecology.

Natalia Molebatsi (Performance Studies)

• Natalia Molebatsi is a Pan-African feminist and queer poet, writer and cultural worker from South Africa. Her research interests include feminist media inquiry; Black queer and feminist performance and poetry in theatre as radical (intersectional) feminist intervention. Natalia has performed poetry and presented creative writing workshops in over 15 countries.

Christopher Muhoozi (history)

• Christopher Muhoozi’s project examines ethnicity and race in southwestern Uganda before independence. Before coming to Northwestern he taught for nine years at Uganda's oldest and leading university, Makerere University.

Jesús Muñoz (Comparative Literary Studies)

• Jesús C. Muñoz is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literary Studies affiliated with the Middle East and North African Studies program and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in the MENA cluster. His research interests include decolonial theory, Chicana feminist philosophy and literature, Critical Muslim Studies, feminist epistemology, spirituality, magic, and mysticism.

Moritz Nagel (History)

• Moritz Nagel is a Mellon Cluster Fellow with PAS. His research focus is Duala-German trade and colonial conquest in the Cameroons, emphasizing the political functions of West African institutions such as initiation associations, public debates and assemblies, and talking drums. Besides data mining in archives, he enjoys working with various kinds of sources including orally transmitted histories, objects in museum collections, and early audio recordings. His paper, “Precolonial Segmentation Revisited: Initiation Societies, Talking Drums and the Ngondo Festival in the Cameroons,” won the Graduate Student Paper Prize of the African Studies Association in 2016.

Teddy Nakate (Religious Studies)

• Teddy Nekate’s research focuses on theological reflection on human suffering and sense making among marginalized HIV women in Uganda.

Alesanmi Richmond Rerelope Odufisan (engineering)

• Alesanmi Richmond Rerelope Odufisan is a second-year PhD student in mechanical engineering in the Balogun Group at Northwestern. He completed his Bachelor's in civil engineering at Afe Babalola University in Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State, Nigeria, in 2019 and his Master of Civil Engineering at Stanford University in 2022. His research focus centers on the development of computational models for simulating wave propagation in materials to understand and predict their behavior, both in the context of incoherent waves (for example, nanoscale thermal transport) and coherent waves (e.g., the viscoelastic response of biological tissue). He uses HPC systems extensively to carry out these simulations.

Uchechukwu Oguchi (History)

• Uchechukwu Oguchi is a PhD student in Northwestern’s History Department and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in the Program of African Studies (PAS). She holds a B.A. from Baylor University (2023). Her undergraduate thesis provides an analysis of ethnic distrust and colonial constitution-making in Nigeria from 1945 to 1960. She enjoys running, reading, and making music in her free time.

Ewurama Okai (Sociology)

• Areas of interest: Sociology of Culture, Collective Memory, Race and Ethnicity, Education, Knowledge Production, Postcolonial Theory, Sociology of Law, Qualitative Methods

Uche Okpa-Iroha (Art History)

• Uche Okpa-Iroha is doctoral student with an interest in the development of modes and theories of representation, as they have been constructed historically but as they hold purpose and relevance for artists and scholars interrogating their societies in the 21^st century. Presently, he is exploring photographic archives in Nigeria as part of new research investigating these archives as sites of silence, memory, and history, and how these materials hold valuable information for shaping new historical discourse in contemporary times. Okpa-Iroha is the Founder and Director of Lagos-based informal photography school, The Nlele Institute. He is a founding member of the Nigerian photography group the Blackbox Photography Collective and of the Invisible Borders Trans-African photography travel group. Twice has won the Grand Prix Seydou keita Award for the best photography creation with the “Under Bridge Life” (2009) and “the Plantation Boy” (2015).  He also received the Jean Paul Blachere prize in 2009 and the Callanan Excellence in Teaching Award by Center Santa Fe, New Mexico USA in 2022. Okpa-Iroha is an ex-resident and alumnus of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2011- 2012). He co-founded the photography and video art night of projections – FOTOPARTY Lagos and the Lagos Portfolio Review. Okpa-Iroha is also the founder of Lagos Open Range Exhibition Project.

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William Richardson (Sociology)

• William Richardson’s main interests focus on postcolonial and Africana sociology and Eurocentricism within sociology.

Rebecca Rwakabukoza (History)

Raven Schwam-Curtis (African American Studies)

• Raven's research interests include Black Feminist Theory, Afro-Asian Solidarities, Coalition Building, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and Multiracialism.

Dilpreet Singh (Dil Singh Basanti) (Archaeology/Anthropology)

• Dil Singh is an archaeologist working on the Aksumite kingdom (50-800 AD) of northern Ethiopia. His research examines how local-level mythologies of the "family" reconfigure larger scale social processes, particularly global connections/cosmopolitanism, ontologies of death and body, sustainability/water management, emotion and biology, political organization, and the rise of monsters.

Craig Stevens (Anthropology)

• Craig is interested in transcultural Black identity formation in the Back-to-Africa movement, African and African Diasporic solidarity via expressive and material cultures.

Rory Sykes (Art History)

• Rory Sykes’s main interest is Palestinian visual culture during the second half of the 20th Century; however, she is also interested in contemporary art from the Middle East and North Africa and the relationship between lens-based media and documentary claims under conditions of catastrophe.

Angela Tate (History)

• Angela Tate studies transnational American history, specializing in African American & African Diaspora and cultural studies. Her research focuses on Black women's activism in art and performance across the US, Caribbean, Africa, and Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries. She is also co-coordinator for the Public Humanities Colloquium, and serves in various leadership roles across the university.

Marquis Taylor (History)

• Marquis Taylor specializes in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century African American history. His work has received funding from the Chabraja Center for Historical Research, the Mellon Foundation, and Social Science Research Center, and The Graduate School at Northwestern.

Elijah Watson (Anthropology)

• Elijah's research broadly focuses on maternal and child health, with a particular interest in maternal stress, child growth and development, infant feeding, and food and water insecurity.

Maximilian Weylandt (Political Science)

• Max Weylandt's research interests include democratization, public opinion, and political parties. He published a paper in Electoral Studies in 2015 titled "The 2014 National Assembly and presidential elections in Namibia."

Aaron Wilford (History)

• Aaron Wilford specialized in environmental history.

Umar Yandaki (History)

• Umar Yandaki is a doctoral student in the Department of History. He earned his Bachelor in History at Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto (Nigeria). He is interested in historical memory and the politics of erasures in the history of Hausaland, Northern Nigeria. Yandaki is a winner of the 2023 grants competition for writers, researchers and activists jointly organized by the Center for Democracy and Development (CDD) Abuja and the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA-Nigeria). He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles in journals and books on themes ranging from historiography to gender history, medical history, financial history and security studies.

Sreddy Yen (English)

• Field: 20th/21st-century Anglophone literature
  Areas of Interest: contemporary African and Caribbean literatures, global modernisms, queer studies

Recent PhDs

• Yemi Ajisebutu, "Oríkì and Being: The Yorùbá Consciousness in Africana Diasporic Fiction and Art," Comparative Literary Studies, 2024. Advisor: Evan Mwangi.

• Chernoh Bah, “Resolving an Empire Problem: Public Health, Convict Labor, and the Revenue Crisis in Colonial Sierra Leone, 1914 -1944,” History, 2024. Advisors: Sean Hanretta and Helen Tilley.

• Lamin Keita, "The Politics of Community Resilience to Armed Jihadism in West Africa;" Political Science, 2024. Advisor: William Reno.

• Mitchell Edwards, "Cultivating Refuge: A Long History of Dealing with Disaster in North-Central Uganda, 1720–2006;" History, 2024. Advisor: Jonathon P. Glassman.

• Gorgui Ibrahima Tall, “The Mechanisms of Cultural Production in the Postcolony: Plurality, Relationality, and (Auto)-Translation in the Senegalese Novel.” French and Francophone Studies, 2024. Advisor: Nasrin Qader.

• Colin Bos, “Conservators of the World: Sacred Objects, Archaeology, and the State in Southwestern Nigeria,” History, 2023. Advisor: Helen Tilley.

• Bright Gyamfi, “Dreaming of Pan-African Unity: Nkrumahist Scholars and the Global Development of African Diaspora Studies,” History, 2023. Advisor: Sean Hanretta.

• Dela Kuma, "Legitimate" Trade: Local Taste Practices & Consumer Power in Southeastern Ghana, Amedeka (19th to early 20th C A.D), Anthropology. Advisor: Amanda Logan.

• Salih Noor, “The Legacies of Liberation: Anti-Colonial Struggles, Critical Junctures, and Political Development in Southern Africa,” Political Science. Advisor: Will Reno.

• Moussa Seck, “The Making of the Stranger in the Francophone Migration Novel,” French and Francophone Studies. Advisor: Nasrin Qader.

• Claudia Garcia-Rojas, "Blackness and the U.S. National Security Paradigm: Legacies of Counterintelligence and Black Liberation, 1900-Present," African American Studies, 2023. Advisor: Sylvester Johnson

• Grace Deveney - “News, Weather, and Sports: Televisual Tactics and Black Art, 1970–1995,” PhD, 2022. Art history. Advisor: Krista A. Thompson.

• Andrea Daniel Rosengarten, “Remapping Namaqualand: Negotiating Ethnicity and Territoriality in a Southern African Borderland,” PhD, History, 2022. Advisor: Jonathan Glassman.

• Antawan Byrd, "Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art. PhD, Art history, 2022. Advisor: Krista A. Thompson.

• Andrea Adomako, "‘Because We Failed Her’: Black Fictive and Formative Friendships in the 1960s and 1970s;" African American Studies, 2022. 

• Christa Kuntzelman, "Refugees’ Understanding of  Rights and Governance Structures: A Study of Urban Refugees in Uganda,” Political Science, 2022. Advisor: Wnndy Pearlman.

• Caitlin Cooke Monroe, “Making History: Women’s Knowledge and the Creation of a Historical Discipline in Western Uganda,” PhD, History, 2022. Advisor: Jonathan Glassman.

• Vanessa Watters Opalo, “Credit Worthy: Pentecostal Finance in West Africa,” PhD, Anthropology, 2022. Advisor: Robert Launay.

•  Patrick Mbullo Owuor, “Dams and Displacement: Biosocial Impacts of the Thwako Multipurpose Dam Construction among Women in Makueni County, Kenya,” PhD, Anthropology, 2022. Advisor: Sera Young.

• Perrin, Ayodeji Kamau, “LGBTQ Human RightsMmobilizations in Domestic and International Courts: A Transnational Perspective on the Judicialized Decriminalization of Homosexual Sex .PhD, Sociology, 2022. Advisor: Karen Alter.

• Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga, "We Dance with Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond." Anthropology. 2022. Advisor: Adia Benton.

• David Peyton, "Property Security in the Midst of Insecurity: Wealth, Defense, Violence, and Institutional Statsis in the Democratic Republish of Congo,” Political Science, 2021. Advisor: Will Reno.

• Khoury, Rana, “Aid and Activism across the Syrian Warscapte,” Political Science, 2021. Advisor: Will Reno.

• Mlondolozi Bradley Zondi, “Unmournable Void: Tending-Toward the Black Dead and Dying in Contemporary Black Performance and Visual Art,” PhD, Performance Studies, 2020. Advisor: Huey G. Copeland.

• Magda Boutros, “The True Color of Police Violence: How Activists Expose Racialized Policing in Colorblind France.” Sociology, 2020. Advisor: John Hagan.

• Mohwanah Fetus, “Geographies of Memory and Pleasure in African American and Caribbean Literatures,” English, 2020. Advisor: Alexander Weheliye.

• Maxwell Akanbi (Health Sciences) 2020 - "Impact of Antiretroviral Theraphy Eligibility Expansion on the Epidemiology of HIV-associated Kaposi Sarcoma in Nigeria"

•  Andrew Wooyoung Kim (Anthropology) 2020 - "Biological memories of apartheid: Intergenerational effects of apartheid-based trauma on birth outcomes, stress physiology, and mental health in Soweto, South Africa," advisor: Chris Kuzawa.

• William FitzSimons (History) 2020 - "Distributed Power: Climate Change, Elderhood, and Republicanism in the Grasslands of East Africa, c. 500 BCE to 1800 CE"

• Rachel Mihuta Grimm (French and Francophone Studies) 2020 - "The Afterlives of Amnesia: Remembering the Algerian War of Independence in Contemporary France and Algeria, 1999–2019"

• F. Delali Yawa Kumavie (English) 2020 - "Dreams of Flight: Literary Mapping of Black Geographies through the Air, Airplane, and Airport"

• Marcos Leitao de Almeida (History) 2020 - "Speaking of Slavery: Slaving Strategies and Moral Imaginations in the Lower Congo (Early Times to the Late 19th Century)"

• Corrine E Collins - “Violent Iintimacies and Queer Desires: Hegemonic Multiracialism and the Post-racial Future, PhD, .English; 2019. Advisor: Alexander G. Weheliye.

• Scott Newman (English) | “Sound Figures in Postcolonial African Literature, 1970s to Present” | Advisors: Evan Mwangi (chair), Doris Garraway, and Nasrin Qader.

• Sasha (Alexandra) Klyachkina -  “Reconfiguration of Sub-national Governance: Responses to Violence and State Collapse in the North Caucasus.” PhD, Political Science, 2019. Advisor: Will Reno.

• Kritis hRajbhandari -  “Anarchival Drift and the Limits of Community in Indian Ocean Fiction,” PhD, English, 2019. Advisor: Evan Mwangi.

• Jessica Biddlestone (History) 2019 - "France in Roman Africa: Antiquity and the Making of French Algeria and Tunisia"

• Will Caldwell (Religious Studies) 2019 - "The Fugitive Islamicate: African Muslims and Black Radicalism across the Atlantic (1492-1925)"

• Corrine Collins (English) 2019 - "Violent Intimacies and Queer Desires: Hegemonic Multiracialism and the Post-Racial Future"

• Buddhika Jayamaha (Political Science) 2019 - "Combatants Inside and Out"

• Sasha (Alexandra) Klyachkina (Political Science) 219 - "Reconfiguration of Sub-National Governance: Responses to Violence and State Collapse in the North Caucasus"

• Sean Lee (Political Science) 2019 - "Minorities in Times of Conflict: Civil War in Lebanon and Syria"

• Arturo Marquez, Jr. (Anthropology) 2019 - "Morality at the Margins: Senegalese 'Parallel Worlds' in Barcelona, Spain"

• Mbongeri Mtshali (Performance Studies) 2019 - "Infidel(itie)s of Colour: Unruly Black Bodies, Modernity and Performance in Post-Apartheid South Africa"

• Tyrone S. Palmer (African American Studies) 2019 - "(Anti-)Blackness and the Grammars of Affect"

• Jessica Pouchet (Anthropology) 2019 - "Conservation and Conversation: Language and Political Ideology in a Tanzanian Forest"

• Kritish Rajbhandari (Comparative Literary Studies) 2019 - "Anarchival Drift and the Limits of Community in Indian Ocean Fiction"

• Susanna Sacks (English) 2019 - "Viral Verses: Poetic Movements and Social Media in Southeastern Africa"

• Amy Swanson (Theatre and Drama) 2019 - "(Il)legible Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Contemporary Dance in Senegal"

• Marco Bocchese (Political Science) 2018 - "Justice Cooperatives: Explaining State Attitudes toward the International Criminal Court"

• Matthew Brauer (French and Italian) 2018 - "Text and Territory in the Maghrebi Novel"

• Chad Infante (English) 2018 - "Cool Fratricide: Murder and Metaphysics in Black and Indigenous U.S. Literature"

• Raevin Jimenez (History) 2018 - "Rites of Reproduction: Tradition, Political Ethics, Gender, and Generation among Nguni-Speakers of Southern Africa, 8th-19th Century CE"

• Jahara (Franky) Matisek (Political Science) 2018 - "The Development of Strong Militaries in Africa: The Role of History and Institutions"

• Jessica Neushwander (French and Italian) 2018 - "Rereading Fascism: War, Anti-colonialism, and the Crisis of National Identity in Early 20th Century Far-Right French Literature and Thought"

• Kimberly Seibel (Anthropology) 2018 -"Unsettling Age: Constructions of Later Life and Support in US Resettlement Bureaucracy"

• Leila Tayeb (Performance Studies) 2018 - "Some Upheavals: Music in Libya, 2011-17"

• Rachel Taylor (History) 2018 - "Crafting Cosmopolitanism: Nyamwezi Male Labor, Acquisition, and Honor, c.1750-1914"

• Priscilla Adipa (Sociology) 2017 - "Engaging Spaces, Engaged Audiences: The Socio-Spatial Context of Cultural Experiences in Art Galleries and Art Museums"

• Abdeta Beyene (Political Science) 2017 - "Sovereignty Preservation Attenuating it Elsewhere: The Political and Security Dimensions of Buffer Zones"

• Emma Chubb (Art History) 2017 - "Migration Forms: Contemporary Art in and out of Morocco, 1999-2012"

• Sakhile Matlhare (Sociology) 2017 - "'Africanness' as a Professional Trading Chip: Contemporary African Artists as Producers and Secondary Arbiters in the Gatekeeping Process"

• Rachel Sweet (Political Science) 2017 - "State-Rebel Relations during Civil War: Institutional Change behind Frontlines"

• Marlous van Waijenburg (History) 2017 - "Financing the Colonial African State: Forced Labor and Fiscal Capacity"