Jonny Steinberg is Professor of African Studies at Oxford and is currently Visiting Professor in African Politics at Yale. Among his books are The Number, a history of crime and punishment in South Africa, and A Man of Good Hope, which explores migration and nativism in Sub-Saharan Africa. Steinberg was an inaugural winner of the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes awarded by Yale University and was twice the recipient of South Africa's premier literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. He is currently working on a social history of South Africa's transition to...

Robert Lorway is Associate Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Centre for Global Public Health, University of Manitoba, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Intervention Politics and Social Transformation. His research analyzes how forms of intervention life unfurl around transnationally-mediated attempts to alleviate the suffering of stigmatized people. He has written two books on the subject, Namibia’s Rainbow Project: Gay Rights in an African Nation, and AIDS Activism, Science and Community across Three Continents. In his current book...

Youssef Carter is a College Fellow in the departments of Anthropology and African & African-American Studies at Harvard University. Prior to coming to Harvard as a visiting faculty member, he was a Research Fellow for the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Visiting Scholar in the department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

His forthcoming manuscript explores the healing practices, migrations, and exchanges that define the Mustafawi Tariqa of the United States, Spain, and Senegal. Through extensive...

Ronald Niezen is the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy in the Faculty of Law and Department of Anthropology at McGill University. He has a PhD from Cambridge University and has done research on Islamic reform in West Africa, justice campaigns in Aboriginal communities in northern Canada and on the international movement of indigenous peoples in the United Nations. His books include: The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Difference (University of California

Press 2003) Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and...

Lisa Lindsay is Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  A specialist in the history of Nigeria, the slave trade, and the Atlantic world, she is the author of Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth Century Odyssey from America to Africa, which won the African Studies Association’s prize for the best book in any field of African studies published in 2017.  Previous publications include Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Colonial Southwestern...

Otu Kwame Edwin is currently an Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Dr. Otu recently completed a draft of his book manuscript entitled, Amphibious Subjects: Sassoi and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana, which was submitted to Indiana University Press. An ethnographic project on a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sassoi, the book draws on African philosophy,...

Nicholas Githuku holds a Ph.D. from West Virginia University in African history with a focus on Eastern Africa in general, and contemporary political history in Kenya in particular; a Rotary International Mid-professional Certificate in Peace, Development and Conflict Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok-Thailand (2008); a Master of Arts in Armed Conflict and Peace Studies from the University of Nairobi (2004); and a Bachelor of Arts (1^st Class Honors) Degree in History and Political Science &  Public Administration, University of Nairobi (2001).

He...

Elizabeth Foster is Associate Professor of History at Tufts University. She is the author of Faith in Empire: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Rule in French Senegal, 1880-1940 (Stanford 2013), which won the Alf Andrew Heggoy Prize from the French Colonial Historical Society, and most recently, of African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church (Harvard 2019). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies and has received Fulbright, NEH, and ACLS fellowships.

She will be presenting: ...

Evan Mwangi is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University. He is the author of, among other works, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender Sexuality (2009);Translation in African Contexts: Postcolonial Texts, Queer Sexuality, and Cosmopolitan Fluency(2017); and The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature & Posthuman Ethics (forthcoming).​ He is at work on two new monographs: one on global rewritings of Conrad's Heart of Darkness ​and the other on Indian...

Donald Donham is a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.  He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1979 and has carried out field research in Ethiopia, South Africa, and most recently, Atlantic West Africa.  He is currently beginning a project on the history of social and cultural anthropology. Professor Donham's principal focus of interest has been understanding forms of power as these changes and the ways that economic systems intertwine with cultural forms. He is...

M. Amah Edoh is Assistant Professor of African Studies in the Global Studies and Languages program at MIT. Her work interrogates the politics of knowledge production about Africa. Centering on material and visual objects traveling between African locations and Europe and North America, Edoh’s research asks what the production and circulation of these forms makes visible about Africa’s place in the world. She will present Tailor-made, tailor-making: Expertise and the negotiation of social status in contemporary West Africa.  Discussant:...

Claudia Gastrow is an anthropologist of Southern Africa specializing in issues of land, urbanism, housing, informality and governance, with a special focus on Angola. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2014, and currently lectures at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.  She will present Anarchic Citizens and Bandit States: Urbanism, Civility, and Materiality in Luanda.  Discussant: Ronald Niezen.

A week in advance, the...

Mekonnen Firew Ayano is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for African Studies where he studies law and development with a focus on land and agricultural policies in Sub-Saharan Africa. Mekonnen received SJD degree from Harvard Law School, LL.M. degree from the American University in Cairo, and LL.B. degree from Addis Ababa University. He will present Land Conflict in Transitional Economies.  Discussant: Pauline Peters.

A week in advance, the presenter’s paper will be circulated through the ...

Nina Sylvanus is an Associate Professor of anthropology at Northeastern University. She received her doctoral training in anthropology and African Studies from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and taught in the anthropology department at Reed College before joining Northeastern. Her research and teaching has focused on the social life of objects, the role of materiality, technology, and gender in the production of culture and economy; and, more recently, on the relationship between supply chain capitalism, container logistics and labor. She ...

Michael Ralph  teaches in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the School of Medicine at New York University. His research combines history and politics with medical anthropology through an explicit focus on debt, slavery, insurance, forensics, and incarceration. Michael holds a BA in Africana Studies from Morris Brown College and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. ...