Abimbola Adelakun | Associate Professor of Global Christianity | adelakun@uchicago.edu

Interests: History of Christianity, Pentecostalism, Performance, Literature, Visual Culture, Digital Culture, Religions in the Americas

Selected publication: Powerful Devices: The Politics and Praxis of Spiritual Warfare (Rutgers University Press, 2022).

Jennifer Cole | Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development (CHD) and the College; Department Chair, CHD; Co-Chair, Committee on African Studies | jcole@uchicago.edu

On leave 2025–2026

Interests: Madagascar, social and cultural anthropology, memory, gender, sexuality, transnational kinship, urban space, youth and intergenerational transformation, Christianity, African migration to Europe

Selected publication: Sex and Salvation: Imagining the Future  in Madagascar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Samuel Fury Childs Daly | Associate Professor of History and the College | dalys@uchicago.edu

Interests: Independent Africa; law; warfare; crime; politics of military regimes

Selected publication: A History of the Republic of Biafra: Law, Crime, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Adom Getachew | Professor of Political Science and the College; Interim Chair of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity | agetachew@uchicago.edu

Interests: modern political thought with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the history of international law, theories of empire and race, black political thought and post-colonial political theory

Selected publication: Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton University Press, 2019).

K.J. Hickerson | Assistant Instructional Professor of History and the College; Colonizations Chair in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity | hickerson@uchicago.edu

Interests: African history; Middle Eastern history; race and ethnicity; religion; imperialism in East and Central Africa; the global nineteenth century; visual and material culture

Loren Kruger | Professor Emeritus of English, Comparative Literature, Theatre and Performance Studies, and the College | lkruger@uchicago.edu

Interests: South Africa, literature and visual culture, drama and performance, urban studies, critical theory.

Selected publication: A Century of South African Theatre (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019)

Fidèle Mpiranya | Instructional Professor of Swahili | fmpiranya@uchicago.edu

Interests: Swahili and African linguistics, phonology and morphosyntax of Bantu languages, Swahili textbook development, Taarab music from East Africa and Zanzibar.

Selected publication: [with Rachel Walker and Dani Byrd] “An Articulatory View of Kinyarwanda Coronal Harmony,” Phonology 25, no. 3 (2008): 499-535.

Salikoko S. Mufwene | Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College; Professor on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology; Professor on the Committee on the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science | s-mufwene@uchicago.edu

Interests: Language evolution, with special attention to creole language varieties, African-American English, and colonial Englishes. Mufwene also works on semantics, lexicography, pragmatics, and Bantu morphosyntax.

Selected Publication: Editor, with Anna María Escobar, The Cambridge handbook of language contact (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

Natacha Nsabimana | Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the College | natachansa@uchicago.edu

Interests: law and subjectivity, violence, social justice, incarceration, art, Rwanda.

Nikhita Obeegadoo | Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies | nikhitao@uchicago.edu

Interests: Contemporary francophone and world literature, critical race studies and decolonial theory, archipelagic studies, environmental humanities (including oceanic humanities), and medical humanities.

Emily Lynn Osborn | Associate Professor, Department of History and the College; Deputy Dean, Office of Research and Teaching Innovations, The College; Faculty Director, Dakar Study Abroad Program; Co-Chair, Committee on African Studies | eosborn1@uchicago.edu

On leave 2025–2026

Interests: Precolonial states, Francophone Africa, gender, colonialism, technology transfer and diffusion, aluminum, material culture, artisinal production and labor.

Selected Publication: Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African  State from the Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011).

Stephan Palmié | Norman & Edna Freehling Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College | palmie@uchicago.edu

Interests: Afro-Cuban religious formations, the Atlantic world, systems of slavery and unfree labor, constructions of race and ethnicity, historical representation, knowledge production, conceptions of embodiment and moral personhood, genomics, and the anthropology of food and cuisine.

Selected Publication: Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Western Scientific Practice – and Vice Versa (University of Chicago Press, 2023).

François G. Richard | Associate Professor of Anthropology, Romance Languages & Literatures, Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity, and the College | fgrichard@uchicago.edu

On leave: Winter and Spring 2026

Interests: West Africa (Senegal), Atlantic World, historical anthropology, archaeology, politics, rural mobility, missionaries, material culture.

Selected Publication: Reluctant Landscapes: Historical Anthropologies of Political Experience in Siin, Senegal (University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Kathryn Takabvirwa | Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College | ktakabvirwa@uchicago.edu

Interests: Policing; governance; migration; mobility; post-coloniality; the state in Africa; the politics of representation; conceptions of xenophobia; Southern Africa, especially Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Thuto Thipe | Assistant Professor of History and the College | tthipe@uchicago.edu

Interests: Social and legal history of 19th and 20th century South Africa; African history; urban studies; history of race; colonialism and Black freedom struggles

Jenny Trinitapoli | Professor of Sociology and the College; Director of the Committee for International Social Science Research | jennytrini@uchicago.edu

Interests: Demography, Sociology of religion, Social dimensions of the AIDS epidemic

Selected Publication: An Epidemic of Uncertainty: Navigating HIV and Young Adulthood in Malawi (University of Chicago Press, 2023).