NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Global health, biomedicine, development, humanitarianism, political economy, race, gender, sports, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, US
Job Titles:
- Professor of History, Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences
Akin Ogundiran Professor of History, Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences Area(s) of Interest: Geographic Field(s): African History Thematic Field(s): War and Empire in History; Urban History; Gender and Sexuality History; Colonial, Imperial, and Diasporic History; Religious History; African Diaspora and African American History; Environmental History Principal Research Interest(s): Africa since 500 BC Phone number: 847-491-8963 E-mail: ogundiran@northwestern.edu Short Bio: Akin Ogundiran (Ph.D., Boston, 2000) is broadly interested in the archaeology and history of Africa over the past 2,500 years, with emphasis on the Yoruba world (West Africa). His earlier research efforts sought to understand the impacts of global/regional political economies on community formations and how social actors created knowledge, communities, and identities with objects and the landscape. Ogundiran's current research intersects cultural, political economy, and environmental approaches to study the history of complex social systems at different scales-e.g., household, urbanism, and empire.
Job Titles:
- Professor of African American Studies
Area(s) of Interest: African American and African Diasporic literatures and popular cultures; Critical theory; Popular musical history.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Short Bio: Amanda Logan, Anthropology, focuses on everyday life in times of environmental, political, and economic change, particularly West Africa's participation in global trade networks.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Managerial Economics & Decision Sciences
Short Bio: Morjaria's research interests are in development economics, organizations and political economy across several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda). His current research focuses on understanding the impact of competition on productivity and relational contracts, industrial policy in emerging markets, and the impact of electoral conflict on firm operations.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Portuguese
Area(s) of Interest: Portuguese language and culture in the lusophone world; linguistic and cultural exchanges between Brazil and the Lusophone Africa; Francophone Africa
Short Bio: Ana Thomé-Williams, Spanish and Portuguese, specializes in Portuguese language and culture in the lusophone world, with a focus on linguistic and cultural exchanges between Brazil and the Lusophone Africa. Fluent in French as well, she also has an interest in the Francophone Africa.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Associate Professor, Kellogg Research Associate Professor, Global Poverty Research Lab
- Development Economist
Area(s) of Interest: market organization in developing countries and productivity-enhancing investments that households may make in health and nutrition, new agricultural technologies, and education
Short Bio: Andrew Dillon is a development economist whose research focuses on how improving productivity increases welfare in developing countries and the methods and measures that establish these causal relationships. His current research focuses on market organization in developing countries and productivity-enhancing investments that households may make in health and nutrition, new agricultural technologies, and education. Ongoing projects are currently being implemented with government, private sector firms, and NGOs in Burkina Faso, Mali and Nigeria.
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.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Art History
Antawan I. Byrd Assistant Professor of Art History Area(s) of Interest: Africa and African Diaspora, Photography, Global Modern and Contemporary, E-mail: abyrd@northwestern.edu Short Bio: Antawan I. Byrd is an art historian and curator. His work focuses on the art and culture of Africa from the late-nineteenth century to the present. Byrd's research investigates histories of entanglement between Africa and the world, especially those mediated by sound technologies, largescale exhibitions and biennials, the circulation of photography, popular culture, and theories and practices of Pan-Africanism. Byrd is especially drawn to analytical models and interpretive methods that accommodate polycentricity and non-linear approaches to time.
Arthur Banshayeko, popularly known as Arthur Ban, as Ama Ata Aidoo Visiting Scholar in the fall quarter. Arthur Banshayeko is a Burundian actor-director who believes that art is the best way for people to meet and discuss freely. It helps people to see and love difference. He observes: "When we tame the beast of otherness and admire difference, we heal, live, and grow!" Arthur's works focus on memories, legacy, and identity. He uses a technique called Corps-Parole-Choeur (CPC) in his mise en scènes, in which he continuously searches for harmony between speech, the body, and connection. He has engaged in many awareness-raising projects on identity, peace and reconciliation, gender equity, human rights, and mental health through the screen, the radio, and the stage. His projects have been showcased in Burundi, DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), Belgium, Tunisia, Germany, Uganda, Kenya, France, Malawi, Togo, Switzerland, Austria, Romania and Rwanda.
Arthur is an alumnus of the 24th class of the Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab. He is passionate about the 3rd Sustainable Development Goals (SDG): good health and well-being; and SDG 5 (Gender equality). He has worked as an an actor or director on short and feature films like: Imashoka, Après la pluie, Les gros cailloux, Arretez Elsie, La tentation, Umutwe w'inkuba, Aborted Vow, Gahanga, L'irreprochable démasqué, Them, among others.
Arthur's most recent production was a Burundi-Germany musical collaboration about King Mwezi Gisabo's resistance against the German occupation from 1896 to 1903 in Burundi and resistance in Gerhart Hauptmann' The Weavers (1892). He is now the Artistic Director of Diridiri Festival, Burundi's first Theatre Festival for Young Audiences.
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.
Short Bio: Ava Thompson Greenwell teaches video journalism courses and has served as associate dean and department chair. She is the co-director of Medill's South Africa Journalism Residency Program and is currently in production on "Mission Possible, Chicago's Free South Africa Movement," a historical documentary. Her research interests focus on the intersection of race, gender and journalism. She worked as a reporter at WFLA-TV, Tampa, FL; WCCO-TV in Minneapolis, MN; WEHT-TV in Evansville, IN and as a freelance correspondent at WTTW-TV and WGN-TV in Chicago.
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.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Performance Studies
Short Bio: Bimbola Akinbola is Chicago-based artist and scholar. Working at the intersection of African diaspora studies, performance, visual culture, and postcolonial theory, Dr. Akinbola's scholarly work is concerned with kinship and belonging, gender performance, and affect in the African diaspora.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
Short Bio: Brannon Ingram, Religious Studies, specializes in Islamic Studies, with a focus on Sufism in South Africa and modern South Asia. His research engages with transnational and translocal flows of people, texts and ideas in the global Muslim South and how these flows have upended traditional forms and structures of authority in Islam.
Job Titles:
- Board of Trustees Professor
- Director of the Program
Chris Abani, Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, is an acclaimed novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter and playwright. His wide-ranging interests include African poetics, world literature, African presences in medieval and renaissance cultural spaces, West African music, and Yoruba and Igbo philosophy and religion.
Job Titles:
- Development Economist
- Professor of Economics, Co - Director of Global Poverty Research Lab
Short Bio: Chris Udry is a development economist whose research focuses on rural economic activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. His current research examines technological change, risk and financial markets, gender and households, property rights, psychological well-being and economic decision-making and a variety of other aspects of rural economic organization.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Brazilian
- Professor of Portuguese
Short Bio: César Braga-Pinto is an Associate Professor of Brazilian, Lusophone African and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of As Promessas da História: Discursos Proféticos e Assimilação no Brasil Colonial (2003) and the editor of Ligeiros Traços: escritos de juventude de José Lins do Rego (2007).
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."
Short Bio: David Schoenbrun, History, is concerned with the gendered history of power in Uganda and the Great Lakes region from earliest times to the fifteenth century.
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of French
Short Bio: Doris Garraway, French, focuses on early modern francophone cultural studies, comparative 20th century francophone literatures (including those of sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean) and travel exoticism in early modern French literature.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Performance Studies and African American Studies
Short Bio: Dotun Ayobade (he, his, him) holds a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in Performance Studies and African American Studies. He studies how embodied forms of popular culture shape the meaning of community, justice and activism in postcolonial West Africa. Ayobade attends to how West Africans activate aesthetic and everyday social performance to shape their lived realities, forge belonging, and declare being within the political economy of postcolonial Africa. His work considers the function of embodiment in and across a range of cultural forms-i.e., dance, theatre, sound, material culture, performance art and photography-alongside the multiple significations of the aestheticized body in contemporary Nigeria: as an archive of collective desires and underexplored histories, as a fodder for subversive worldmaking, and as a space for rearticulating meaning and possibility between Africa and the African diaspora. His work sits at the intersections of Dance and Performance Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, and Popular Cultural and Postcolonial Studies.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Journalism
Short Bio: Douglas Foster, Medill, teaches feature writing, a regular contributor to major newspapers and magazines, including Smithsonian, the New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times. His most recent book is "After Mandela: The Struggle for Freedom in Post Apartheid South Africa," which examines a country caught between a democratic future and a political meltdown.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Medicine
Area(s) of Interest: HIV research in Malawi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, Swaziland, Namibia and Nigeria; Correlates of immunity to HIV; Diagnosis and management of acute HIV; Optimal delivery of care in resource limited settings
Short Bio: Dr. Shannon Galvin, Center for Global Health, Feinberg School of Medicine, is a faculty in the Infectious Diseases division at Feinberg School of Medicine and the Director of Clinical Programs & Training for the Center for Global Health. She has over 10 years experience working as a clinician and HIV researcher in Malawi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Southern Sudan, Swaziland, Namibia and Nigeria.
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 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.
Erin Delaney Professor of Law Area(s) of Interest: constitutional design, federalism, courts Phone number: 312-503-0925 E-mail: erin.delaney@law.northwestern.edu Short Bio: Erin Delaney, Law and Political Science, studies courts in comparative perspective, with a focus on multi-level governance systems. Her current project explores the impact of colonialism on judicial structure and conceptions of judicial independence in African Commonwealth countries.
Short Bio: Esmeralda Kale is the George and Mary LeCron Foster Curator of the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies.
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.
Area(s) of Interest: African fiction in the contexts of literary theory; TV news; Sports; Aesthetics; East African hiphop music
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Instruction, Arabic
Short Bio: Fatima Khan teaches Beginning and Intermediate Arabic at Northwestern. Currently she is the coordinator for Intermediate Arabic. She has received the Hewlett Grant for curriculum development to design a course to teach Media Arabic as well as a coursebook to help students understand broadcast news.
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History
Area(s) of Interest: Interplay among environmental, medical, and human sciences in nineteenth and twentieth century Africa; European imperialism and development studies
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of English, Director of American Studies
Area(s) of Interest: Comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies; African American culture
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.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer of Political Science
- Weinberg College Advisor
Area(s) of Interest: West African state development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Expansion of Asante
Short Bio: Jeff Rice, Weinberg College advisor and history lecturer focuses on West African state development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with special interest in the expansion of Asante. He is also the advisor for African Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: How people articulate understandings of history and political-economic change through cultural production and consumption; Competing notions of culture and culturedness
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.
John Hunwick, History and Religion, researched the history of Muslim societies in West Africa, an expert on Arabic sources, focused on the development of West African Islamic scholarship and the translation of primary texts and documents, his documentary Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Saidi's Ta'rikh al-Sudan Down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents won the 2001 African Studies Association Text Prize.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Sociology
Short Bio: Julia Behrman's research explores the relationship between inequality in educational opportunity and demographic processes, with emphasis on fertility and family formation. Much of her work is motivated by a central question: How does family background shape educational opportunities, and in turn, how does education shape fertility, family formation, and the intergenerational transmission of inequality? Her work takes an international comparative perspective that focuses on contexts in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia undergoing rapid economic, social, and demographic change.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Associate Professor of Law, Law
- Professor of Law
Area(s) of Interest: Health and human rights; International criminal law; Corruption
Short Bio: Juliet Sorensen, Clinical Associate Professor of Law, Law and Kellogg, focuses on health and human rights, international criminal law, and corruption. She is a director of the Northwestern Access to Health Project, an interdisciplinary global community health partnership.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Kellogg School of Management and Global Health Studies
Area(s) of Interest: international healthcare, medical technologies and cost effectiveness of healthcare in Africa
Short Bio: Kara Palamountain has managed over 50 Kellogg field research teams conducting market entry analysis for medical technologies in over a dozen countries. She was a co-investigator on a cost-effectiveness project at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and has also served as an external reviewer for various projects under consideration by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Karen Alter Political Science and Law Area(s) of Interest: Creation and influence of international courts in Latin America and Africa Phone number: 847-491-4842 E-mail: kalter@northwestern.edu Short Bio: Karen Alter, Political Science and Law, studies the political influence of international courts around the world. More recent work examines the creation and influence of international courts in Latin America and Africa.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Relationship between expressive culture, ethnicity, and political economy in North Africa
Job Titles:
- Associate Director of Curatorial Affairs, Block Museum
Job Titles:
- Business Administrator / Financial
Job Titles:
- Professor of Art History
- Weinberg College Board of Visitors Professor and Professor
Area(s) of Interest: Postcolonial theory and visual culture; Race and representation; The imaginative geography of the tropics; Caribbean art; African diaspora performance arts; Photography in Africa and the African diaspora
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine
Area(s) of Interest: Evaluation, global health, HIV infection, health disparities, public health, qualitative research methods, translational research, women's health, women's reproductive health
Short Bio: Dr. Neubauer's research focuses on health education and promotion, global health, and health disparities. She leads and collaborates on projects that employ mixed-method approaches to develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate translational and culturally responsive research and evaluation.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Economics
Area(s) of Interest: How social networks affect the spread of information and ultimately decision-making in labor markets and in agriculture; Ongoing field projects in Mali and Malawi.
Short Bio: Lori Beaman, Economics, is a development economist whose research primarily focuses on how social networks affect the spread of information and ultimately decision-making in labor markets and in agriculture. She has ongoing field projects in Mali and Malawi.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Material culture of the African Diaspora; Social inequality and identity in the Caribbean
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of French
Area(s) of Interest: Modern Arabic literature; African literature in French and English; and Literary theory and criticism
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Global Health and Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Global and state health policy; Donor-funded health interventions; Biomedical practice in Tanzania's health sector from the 1980s to present
Short Bio: Noelle Sullivan is a cultural and medical anthropologist focusing on the politics of global health in practice. Sullivan is concerned about what becomes ‘in vogue' in global health. Which issues or needs tend to be included/excluded or celebrated/marginalized? How global health concerns are taken up, and by whom? She conducts ethnographic fieldwork in northern Tanzania.
Noran Mohamed is interested in the connections between French and Arabic. Her academic interests include postcolonialism, Orientalism, exoticism, and neuro/sociolinguistics.
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.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Instruction, Global Health Studies and Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Humanitarian psychiatry; Global mental health; Medical humanitarianism; Public health challenges in post-conflict settings
Short Bio: Peter's research interests include humanitarian psychiatry, global mental health, medical humanitarianism, and public health challenges in post-conflict settings. His current project has brought him to Sierra Leone, where he has led interdisciplinary cohorts of undergraduates to conduct ethnographic research in collaboration with a small medical humanitarian organization.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Instruction, Swahili
- Professor
Short Bio: Swahili classes are taught by Professor Peter Mwangi. Peter's general research interest area is in current trends in global higher education. He is currently researching on the impact of the Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTLs) on the internationalization of higher education in the U.S.
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.
Job Titles:
- Brandon 's Research Interest Is in the Relationship of African Oral Storytelling Traditions to Contemporary African American Theatre
Brandon's research interest is in the relationship of African oral storytelling traditions to contemporary African American theatre.
Rachel's research interests include postcolonial North Africa, identity politics in France, gender as a way of signifying relationships of power, and Arabic.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Instruction, Arabic
Short Bio: Ragy's work has focused on the Egyptian spoken dialect, and has worked on several curriculum development projects. He has received awards for developing an online tool for his Arabic language students to interact with audio and video explanations while analyzing annotated texts from the Arabic Manuscripts from West Africa collection in Northwestern's Herskovits Library of African Studies.
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.
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.
Rebecca Rwakabukoza is studying the history of reproductive health practice in Western Uganda. She is part of the research team of Wulira! a podcast that re-members women's contribution, experiences, and scholarship in the Uganda story.
Job Titles:
- Associate Director
- Associate Director of ISITA
Rebecca Shereikis
Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA)
Associate Director
Phone number: 847-491-2598
r-shereikis@northwestern.edu
Short Bio: Rebecca Shereikis, ISITA, is a historian with interests in francophone West Africa (particularly Mali), African Muslim responses to colonialism, and Islamic law in African contexts.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Islamic identity in West African societies; The roles of clerics in shaping social discourse; History of anthropological theory; pre-Enlightenment images of African and other cultures
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History
Sean Hanretta
Associate Professor of History
Area(s) of Interest: West African intellectual history, with a focus on Islam; African religions in Francophone West Africa and Ghana
Phone number: 847-491-7557
E-mail: sean.hanretta@northwestern.edu
Short Bio: Sean Hanretta, Associate Professor, History, specializes in West African intellectual history, with a focus on Islam and African religions in Francophone West Africa and Ghana.
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Anthropology
Area(s) of Interest: Reduction of maternal and child undernutrition in low-resource settings, especially sub-Saharan Africa
Short Bio: The focus of Dr. Young's work is on the reduction of maternal and child undernutrition in low-resource settings, especially sub-Saharan Africa. Methodologically, she draws on her training in medical anthropology, international nutrition, and HIV to take a biocultural approach to understanding how mothers in low-resource settings cope to preserve their health and that of their families.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of African American Studies
Job Titles:
- New Foreign Language Teaching Assistant
Staicy Akinyi joins PAS as the new Foreign Language Teaching Assistant. She is a Swahili teacher from Kisumu, Kenya with two years teaching experience at some of the best schools in the country. She holds a BEd from Moi University. Her students have achieved some of Kenya's top student awards. Staicy is passionate about fostering a love for the Swahili language and culture among my students and creating an engaging and supportive learning environment. Outside the classroom she enjoys music, acting, participating in community outreach programs, volunteering, and exploring beautiful landscapes.
Job Titles:
- Senior Associate Director, Office of Fellowships
Area(s) of Interest: Interface between Tanzanian music and nationalism; Wamatengo in southwestern Tanzania; Gender in musical choices; How historical circumstances may stimulate musical action
Short Bio: Stephen Hill Assistant Director, Office of Fellowships, focuses on the interface between Tanzanian music and nationalism, with special reference to the Wamatengo in southwestern Tanzania. His work shows how music reflects and aids the comprehension of new realities during periods of broad social upheaval.
Teddy Nekate's research focuses on theological reflection on human suffering and sense making among marginalized HIV women in Uganda.
Job Titles:
- Associate Dean for Clinical Education
- Professor of Law
Area(s) of Interest: Criminal and juvenile defense; Death penalty appeals; Child-centered projects dealing with the representation of children and juvenile court reform
Short Bio: Thomas Geraghty, Associate Dean for Clinical Education, Professor of law, and Director of Bluhm Legal Clinic, is an expert on criminal and juvenile defense, death penalty appeals, child-centered projects dealing with the representation of children and juvenile court reform.
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.
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.
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.
Area(s) of Interest: Social context of literary production and reception in anglophone West Africa
Short Bio: Wendy Griswold, sociology, investigates the social context of literary production and reception in anglophone West Africa. Her book, Bearing Witness: Readers, Writers, and the Nigerian Novel, received the 2002 Best Book award in cultural sociology the American Sociological Association.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Political Science
Area(s) of Interest: Conflict in the context of state collapse; Political strategies of armed groups and the politics of international intervention and counter insurgency; Somalia and the greater Horn of Africa region
Short Bio: Will Reno studies conflict in the context of state collapse, with a focus on the political strategies of armed groups and the politics of international intervention and counterinsurgency. His main area for recent research is Somalia and the greater Horn of Africa region. Visit Reno's web site.
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.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of History and Religious Studies
Area(s) of Interest: Islamic intellectual history in North and West Africa, from the seventeenth century to the present
Short Bio: Wright teaches classes on Islam in Africa, modern Middle East history, African history, Islamic intellectual history and Islam in America. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history in North and West Africa, from the sixteenth century to the present. He did most of his field research in Senegal, Morocco, and Mauritania, with Arabic, French and Wolof language sources. He is currently collaborating on an analysis and translation of two key primary sources on empire building and Islamic scholarship in West Africa from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
Zainabu Marucha Momanyi has an honors degree from the University of Johannesburg where she held the prestigious Mandela Rhodes Scholarship. Her academic focus was on education leadership and management, reflecting her commitment to fostering educational excellence. In addition, Zainabu is the founder of Brighten a Soul Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Kenya, established to provide support to vulnerable children in Nairobi. Zainabu aspires to a career in education policy making in Africa, especially Kenya. She joins us through Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant fellowship and will be working with Professor Peter Mwangi in his Swahili courses for the 2023-24 academic year.
Job Titles:
- Director of ISITA, Associate Professor of Political Science
Area(s) of Interest: Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa, Islamic Thought; Islam, race and ethnicity; social movements; bureaucratization; equality and citizenship; the State in Africa