Ralph Austen | Professor Emeritus of African History, African Studies, and the College | wwb3@uchicago.edu

Interests: Economics, comparative slavery and slave trade, colonialism and imperialism, African literature.

Selected publication: Trans-Saharan Africa in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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 2023–2024

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).

Adom Getachew | Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College | agetachew@uchicago.edu

ON LEAVE 2023–2024

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

Katie Hickerson | Assistant Instructional Professor of History and the College | 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 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: Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing and Building Johannesburg (Oxford University Press, 2013).

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 Cécile Vigouroux, Globalization and Language Vitality: Perspectives from Africa (London: Continuum Press, 2009).

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

ON LEAVE 2023–2024

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

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

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; Director of Undergraduate Studies | 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: The Cooking of History: How Not to Study “Afro”-“Cuban” “Religion” (University of Chicago Press, 2013).

François G. Richard | Associate Professor of Anthropology, Romance Languages & Literatures, and the College; Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Anthropology | fgrichard@uchicago.edu

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

Selected Publication: “Political Transformations and Cultural Landscapes in Senegambia during the Atlantic Era: An Alternative View From the Siin”

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

ON LEAVE 2023–2024

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.

Jenny Trinitapoli | Associate Professor of Sociology and the College | jennytrini@uchicago.edu

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

Selected Publication: Religion and AIDS in Africa (with Alexander Weinreb, Oxford University Press 2012)