PROGRAM OF AFRICAN STUDIES

Graduate Students

New Grad 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.

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."

Emily Kamm (History)

• Emily Kamm is a 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.

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.

Marquis Taylor (History)

Returning Graduate Students

Andrea Adomako (African American Studies)

• Andrea Adomako’s research interests include Black girlhood studies, Black feminist theory, literary criticism, Black political thought, and childhood studies.

Yemi Ajisebutu (Comparative Literary Studies)

• Yemi was a 2014 Fulbright (FLTA) Fellow. She is also a cluster fellow in Critical Theory, African Studies, and Poetry and Poetics Colloquium. Yemi holds a Bachelor of Education in English\Literature with a minor in Social Studies from a Nigerian university and an M.A in English (2017) from New Mexico Highlands University, Las Vegas, New Mexico. Her thesis was titled “Removing the Sixth Mountain: Friendship and Inclusion in West African Women’s Fiction,” It focused on cultural specificity and Stiwanism as viable alternatives to mainstream feminism in West African societies. Yemi’s doctoral research employs the Yoruba oral tradition of Oríkì to interrogate the Being of the Nigerian Diaspora in the United States. Her areas of interest include critical theory, postcolonial feminist theory, African Literature, oral traditions, 21st-Century Nigerian diasporan Literature, and orality in pre-colonial narratives, especially in 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.

Michael Angland (Anthropology)

• Michael is interested in death, reflexivity, and national identity in France and North Africa; funerary rituals.

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.

Chernoh Bah (History)                                           

• Chernoh Alpha M. Bah is a doctoral student in the Department of History. Educated at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College, he holds a B.A. in history and sociology, and a diploma in African Studies. Before coming to Northwestern, he worked extensively in West Africa as a journalist, political activist, and writer. He is the author of The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians, and Neocolonialism in West Africa: A Collections of Articles and Essays. His writings engage the themes of colonialism and post-colonialism, Pan-Africanism, the African anti-colonial movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and contemporary multinational corporate exploitation in the Mano River region of West Africa specifically the countries of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. His current research focuses on the history of medicine and medical experimentation in West Africa during the colonial period.

Fullamusu Kadija Bangura (English)

• Fullamusu Bangura’s research interests include queerness and healing practices in the literature of the African Diaspora as well as the intersections of race, gender, class, and African politics. Her 2015 senior thesis investigated feminine water spirits of the African Diaspora. She has served as a City Year AmeriCorps member, working in an English/Language Arts classroom with 6-8th graders in North Lawndale. She is passionate about blogging and writes essays about black mermaids and Beyoncé Knowles, among other topics, at fullamusings.wordpress.com. In addition, she participates in Assata’s Daughters, an intergenerational organization that promotes social action in the African American community.

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.

Colin Bos (History)

• Colin Bos is interested in the sociocultural history of West Africa before independence. In his BA thesis, he examined the political uses of disease and settler mortality in the liberated African settlements of Sierra Leone and Liberia from 1825 to 1850, particularly how the use of the language of disease control intersected with deep anxieties about race, nationalism, and the idea of “coming home.”

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. As an artist, RMB's work has been commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and Yale University, New Haven, CT; and has shown at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, IL; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, IL; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, New York, NY; University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Centro Cultural Costaricense Norteamericano, San Jose, Costa Rica; and other venues. She has received the Artadia Award, the City of Chicago's Artist Residency, and the Yale Mellon Research Grant. Her work and words have been featured and published in Art Forum, Blouin Modern Painters, Chicago Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Her viral essay "Open Letter to My Fellow Young Artists and Scholars on the Margins" was shared over 9K times online as of 2017.

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.

Claudia Garcia-Rojas (African American Studies)

• Claudia Garcia-Rojas lived in Tunisia before the uprising; she has also lived in France, Germany, and Mexico. Besides her doctoral studies at Northwestern, she is Amnesty International’s “Stop the Violence Against Women” campaign coordinator for the Midwest, a contributing writer at Truthout and Bitch Media, and a commentator on race and gender issues on Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo. See Truthout’s interview with her, “The Surveillance of Blackness: From the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to Contemporary Surveillance Technologies,” http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35086-the-surveillance-of-blackness-from-the-slave-trade-to-the-police.

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.

Bright Gyamfi (History)                           

• Bright Gyamfi is a doctoral student in the Department of History. Prior to attending Northwestern University, he received his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame where he majored in history and political science. While at Notre Dame, he received several research grants including the Balfour Hesburgh Undergraduate Research Fellowship, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and Experiencing the World Fellowship that enabled him to conduct archival research in Ghana, the United Kingdom, Trinidad & Tobago, and the United States. He was a recipient of the U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship. After his undergraduate studies, he was awarded the Thomas J. McMahon IV Endowment for Excellence for the Pursuit of Scholarship at the University of Oxford where he earned an MSc in African Studies. His research focuses on West African intellectual history, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and institutes of African studies.

Charina Herrera (African American Studies)

• Charina Herrera research interests focus on Black thought, critical race theory, racial identity, ontology, public memory, pedagogy of slavery, resistance, slavery, maroonage, theories of violence, Black anger and afro-latinx studies.

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.

Lamin Keita (Political Science)

• Lamin Keita worked as a journalist for Citizen FM Radio in the Gambia until then President Yahya Jammeh shut it down, along with other independent media outlets, in the early 2000s. After receiving political asylum in the United States, Keita completed his associate’s degree at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and then joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison political science department. His research interests include the history of Islamic institutions and the differential entrenchment of Islamic radical jihadism in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali.

Emma Kennedy (Art History)

• Emma M. Kennedy researches the intersection of photography and the African diaspora with a focus on the complications and questions that surround “the archive” and the presence/absence of black subjects within it. First introduced to photography through an undergraduate seminar on Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, Emma has pursued photography through various academic and professional projects. While working as a curatorial intern at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in 2016, she curated a selection of vernacular photographs from the 19th and 20th century. Emma has also worked in a variety of different positions at The Phillips Collection, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, Aperture magazine, and most recently the art publisher Prestel Publishing. Emma has a B.A. in Art History from Mount Holyoke College.

Andrew Kim (Anthropology)

• Andrew Kim is a biological anthropology student interested in studying the intergenerational effects of apartheid-era racialized violence on physical and mental health in Johannesburg, South Africa. Using a two-generation longitudinal cohort study beginning in 1990, he plans to identify the biocultural mechanisms of generational trauma and the socio-ecological factors that enhance resilience among the children of trauma survivors.

Geraud Letang (Political Science; visiting scholar from Sciences-Po, Paris)

• Geraud Letang’s dissertation topic is “War experiences, imperial practices and state rebuilding. Free France and Chad (1940-1944).”

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.
  
  Sarah Moore (Political Science)

• Sarah Moore holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico and is interested in comparative politics.

Christopher Muhoozi (Performance Studies)

• 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.

Scott Peter Newman (English/Comparative Literary Studies)

• Scott Newman is broadly interested in postcolonial theory, globalization and the novel, Anglophone and Francophone African literature, magical realism, “dictator novels,” and narratives of development in fiction and politics.

Salih Noor (Political Science)

• Salih Nur’s research interests include comparative African politics, especially democratization, political regimes and regime transitions, and authoritarian legacies. His dissertation project, "The Legacies of Liberation," seeks to understand path-dependence and regime development in postcolonial Africa. He argues that violent liberation struggles represent a critical juncture that shaped postindependence politics and society in countries under former liberation movements.

Ewurama Okai (Sociology)

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

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.

Moussa Seck (French and Italian)

• Moussa’s academic interests include the interrelation of Religion and Literature in West Africa, Post colonialism, Orientalism and Cinema in Africa.

Kimberly Seibel (Anthropology)

• Kimberly Seibel’s areas of interest are refugee and migrant identities, the state and citizenship, and border studies. She is studying the Chad/Cameroon borderland, specifically the area of Kousseri, Cameroon and N'Djamena, Chad.

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.

Gorgui Ibrahima Tall (French and Italian)

• Ibou's research interests include Francophone African orature and literature and African cinema generally.

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.

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)

Sreddy Yen (English)

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

Recent PhDs

• 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.
• Antwan Byrd - "Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art. PhD, Art history, 2022. Advisor: Krista A. Thompson.
• 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 Institutinal Statsis in the Democratic Republish of Congo,” Political Science, 2021. Advisor: Will Reno.
• Khoury, Rana 2021 -  “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.
• Boutros, Magda - “The True Color of Police Violence: How Activisits 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"
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• 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,
• 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"
• 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"