Presenters

Moradewun Adejunmobi teaches in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of JJ Rabearivelo, Literature and Lingua Franca in Colonial Madagascar, and Vernacular Palaver: Imaginations of the Local and Non-Native Languages in West Africa. Her publications on African literature, popular culture, and media have appeared in the following journals among others: Cultural Critique, Popular Communication, Black Camera, Cinema Journal, African Studies Review, and Oral Tradition. Her current research examines the modes of circulation and media engagement for films from Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry.

 

 

 

 

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the English and African American & African Studies departments at Ohio State University. He is the author of Proverbs, Textuality, and Nativism in African Literature (1998), The Slave’s Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (2005), and Arts of Being Yorùbá (2017). He coedited, with Akin Adéṣọ̀kàn, Celebrating D. O. Fagunwa: Aspects of African and World Literary History (2016). His two main current research interests are “mourning-after” narratives in contemporary African fiction and animist poetics.

 

 

 

Karin Barber is Professor of African Cultural Anthropology at the University of Birmingham. Her research is on popular culture, religion, and the verbal arts, both oral and written. She lived and worked in Nigeria for many years and most of her research has been on Yoruba topics. She has published books on praise poetry, popular travelling theatre and everyday local uses of literacy. She is currently working on early Yoruba print culture. Her most recent book, Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel (2012), which won the Paul Hair Prize in 2013, came out of her current research. Her new book on the history of African popular culture is press. She was co-editor of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute (2006-14), President of the African Studies Association of the UK (2000-2002), and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

 

Florence Bernault, Professor of African History, University of Wisconsin-Madison, works on the history of modern and contemporary Equatorial Africa, and specializes in political and cultural studies. She has also written extensively on prison, punishment, confinement, violence, and witchcraft, and is currently finishing a book on the transforming of spiritual and material agency in Gabon. Her work has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001.

 

 

 

 

 

Matthew H. Brown is a specialist of African screen media, with a focus on Nigeria, including colonial cinema, state television, and video film (or Nollywood). He also writes about African literature and popular music. His teaching includes courses on African screen media, African oral traditions, African literature, and melodrama.

 

 

 

 

Emily Callaci is an assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her forthcoming book, Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania, will be published with Duke University Press, and explores the intellectual and cultural worlds of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in the socialist era. She is currently beginning work on a second book project on the transnational history of the family planning movement in Africa.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Martin Lengemann

Teju Cole is a writer, art historian, photographer, and the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of four books, each in a different genre: the novella “Every Day is for the Thief,” the novel “Open City,” the essay collection “Known and Strange Things,” and, most recently, the genre-defying “Blind Spot,” forthcoming in summer 2017. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. His honors include the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Internationaler Literaturpreis from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the New York City Book Award for Fiction, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Focus Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Windham Campbell Prize from Yale University. His photography has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Milan, Berlin, and New York, and he has given numerous distinguished lectureships.

 

Mireille Calle-Gruber est écrivain et Professeur des Universités en littérature française et esthétique à la Sorbonne Nouvelle où elle dirige le Centre de recherches en Études féminines et de genres / Littératures francophones (CREF&G/LF). Travaillant à la croisée de la littérature, des arts et de la philosophie, elle a publié récemment Tombeau d’Akhnaton (roman), La Différence, 2006 ; Consolation (roman), La Différence, 2010 ; Jacques Derrida, la distance généreuse, La Différence, 2009 ; Claude Simon, l’inlassable réancrage du vécu, La Différence, 2011 ; Marguerite Duras, La noblesse de la banalité (De l’incidence, 2014) ; co-dirigé Assia Djebar. Littérature et transmission, PSN, 2010 ; Pascal Quignard ou la littérature démembrée par les muses, PSN, 2011 ; Daniel Mesguich. Reprise et transmission, PSN, 2012 ; Fictions des genres (Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2013) ; Claude Simon. Les Vies de l’Archive (Editions Universitaires de Dijon, 2014) ; les actes du colloque de Cerisy Pascal Quignard Translations et métamorphoses, Hermann, 2015. Elle a fait paraître la première biographie du Prix Nobel de Littérature 1985 : Claude Simon. Une vie à écrire, Seuil, 2011 ; Migrations maghrébines comparées : genre, ethnicité et religions (France/Québec de 1945 à nos jours) (Riveneuve Editions, 2014). Elle a dirigé l’édition des Oeuvres Complètes de Michel Butor à La Différence (2006-2010, 12 volumes). Elle est co-directrice générale (avec Béatrice Didier et Antoinette Fouque) du Dictionnaire Universel des Créatrices paru en 3 volumes en novembre 2013 aux Editions des Femmes/Belin, qui paraîtra en ligne fin 2015. Elle vient d’éditer Derrida, Gadamer, Lacoue-Labarthe, La Conférence de Heidelberg, 1988. Heideggger, portée philosophique et politique de son œuvre (Lignes, 2014) et Le Cheval (Editions Le Chemin de fer) de Claude Simon, dont elle a écrit la postface « Ce qui ne meurt pas ». Vient de paraître le Dictionnaire sauvage Pascal Quignard qu’elle a dirigé avec Anaïs Frantz (Hermann, 2016).

 

Christy Clark-Pujara is Assistant Professor of History in the Department of African American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the experiences of black people in French and British North America in the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries. I am particularly interested in retrieving the hidden and unexplored histories of African Americans in areas that historians have not sufficiently examined- small towns and cities in the North and Midwest. I contend that the full dimensions of the African American and American experience cannot be appreciated without reference to how black people managed their lives in places where they were few. Furthermore, an absence of a large black populace did not mean that ideas of blackness were not central to the social, political, and economic development of these places. I recently published Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), which examines how the business of slavery – economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods – shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. My current book project, From Slavery to Suffrage: Black on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1740 to 1866, will examine how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-black race relations in the Midwest.

 

Gaurav Desai is a Professor of English at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Most recently he is author of Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India and the Afrasian Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2013).

 

 

 

 

 

Naminata Diabate is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. A scholar of bodies, sexuality, race, biopolitics, and postcoloniality, Naminata’s research primarily explores African, African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literatures, cultures, and film. Her reflections on those subjects have appeared in journals and collections of essays such as The Journal of the African Literature Association; Development, Modernism and Modernity in Africa; Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures, and The Ethnic and Third World Literatures Review of Books. Her most recent writing includes: “Genealogies of Desire, Extravagance, and Radical Queerness in Frieda Ekotto’s Chuchote Pas Trop” (Research in African Literatures, 2016) and “Women’s Naked Protest in Africa: Comparative Literature and Its Futures” (Fieldwork in the Humanities, 2016). Currently, she is working on two book manuscripts: “Naked Agency: Genital Cursing, Biopolitics, and Africa,” and “Same-Sex Sexuality and Mediality in Africa and Its Diaspora.”

 

 

Ainehi Edoro is an assistant professor at Marquette University where she teaches global Anglophone literatures. She holds a doctorate from Duke University. She is the founder and editor of brittlepaper.com—an African literary site. She was born in Nigerian and now lives in Chicago.

 

 

 

 


Nevine El Nossery
is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests and teaching include North African and French Canadian literatures, Francophone Studies, women writing, photo-texts, graffiti, trauma fiction, and Middle-Eastern literature and culture. Her book, Témoignages fictionnels au féminin. Une réécriture des blancs de la guerre civile algérienne was published in 2012 with Rodopi, and she co-edited two volumes: The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art, published in 2013; and Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin. Enracinement et renégociation, published in 2011.

 

Samuel England is Assistant Professor of Arabic at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He teaches Classical and modern Arabic, Mediterranean cultures, and sub-Saharan African sources. He writes on Classical Arabic poetry and prose, courts in the Middle East and Europe, Crusades literature, Arab national arts of the past century, and Romance-language treatments of Islam. His first book, currently in press, is Medieval Empires and the Culture of Competition: Literary Duels at Islamic and Christian Courts (Edinburgh University Press).

 

After 19 splendid years at the U of Michigan, Nancy Rose Hunt is now pleased to be working with new colleagues and students at the U of Florida’s African Studies Center. A Nervous State won the Martin A. Klein Prize. Her first book, A Colonial Lexicon, won the Herskovits Prize. She is working on a few projects: harm in world history; a cross-empire history of madness in Africa; and sequential arts out of Congo, notably the archive of Papa Mfumu’eto le premier.

 

 

Carmen McCain, Assistant Professor of English, Westmont College conducts research on Hausa-language literature, film and popular culture. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled The Politics of Exposure in Hausa Cultural Production, which examines social anxieties surrounding popular culture in northern Nigeria and focuses on several censorship crises following the implementation of shari’a law in twelve Nigerian states. She is interested more broadly in contemporary African literature and film, the politics of language, and translation. Her academic publications include articles in Black Camera, the Journal of African Cinemas, the Journal of African Media Studies, the Global South, and several edited volumes. She has also written for more popular media, including a column she wrote from 2010-2014 for the Nigerian newspaper Daily Trust, and translated excerpts of Hausa literature done for Sentinel Nigeria and several photography exhibits. Having spent part of her childhood in Nigeria and nine more years of research and teaching in Kano, Jos, and Ilorin, she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. She is delighted at the opportunity to come back and present her research at UW-Madison, where she completed her PhD.

Brenna Munro is an associate professor in the English department at the University of Miami, and the author of South Africa and the Dream of Love to Come: Queer Sexuality and the Struggle for Freedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Her other publications include “Caster Semenya: Gods and Monsters” in Safundi (2010), “Nelson, Winnie, and the Politics of Gender” in The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (2014), and “Locating ‘Queer’ in Contemporary Writing of Love and War in Nigeria” in Research in African Literatures (2016).

 

 

 

 

Kenda Mutongi,  Professor of History, Williams College, is a social and cultural historian of postcolonial Africa; her work is interdisciplinary, and combines ethnographic research with narrative history in order to uncover the often-overlooked struggles of the lives of Africans.

Mutongi is the author of MATATU: A History of Popular Transportation in Nairobi (University of Chicago Press, 2017); and Worries of the Heart: Widows, Family, and Community in Kenya (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received an Honorable Mention from the African Studies Association’s Melville J. Herskovits Award for the best scholarly book on Africa in all disciplines. She has also published articles in the main African studies journals.

 

Dr. Akin Ogundiran is Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology & History at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte where he has served as Chair of the Africana Studies Department since 2008. As an archaeological anthropologist and cultural historian, his primary research interests focus broadly on emergent societies and social complexity in Yorubaland, Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora. These include the topics of community formation, landscape history, materiality, rituals, sacred groves, and political economy of Oyo Empire. He is currently completing a book manuscript on Yoruba cultural history since 800 AD. Dr. Ogundiran has received support for his research from the National Humanities Center, Carnegie Foundation, Dumbarton Oaks, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, Boston Humanities Foundation, and a National Science Foundation-supported program, among others. He has authored and edited several publications, including Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic (Indiana University Press, 2014) which won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015. He is also the recipient of a Certificate of Special US Congressional Recognition for Excellence in Service.

 

Julia Praud is an Assistant Professor of French at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York where she serves as Program Director of French in the Department of Foreign Languages. Her research interests include in post-independence francophone literature from Africa and the Caribbean. Her forthcoming article, Les Nuits de Strasbourg: Creolization at the Crossroads of Europe, will be published in the French Review (October 2017).

 

 

 

Dr. Anna Rocca is Associate Professor of French and Italian at Salem State University in Salem, MA. Her research focuses primarily on contemporary women writers of North Africa, autobiography, feminism and transnational feminist movements. In 2011, she co-authored Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin, Saarbrücken, EUE. In 2013, she co-authored Women Taking Risks in Contemporary Autobiographical Narratives, CSP, UK. Among her most recent publications are: – “Tunisia: Reflections upon Women’s Solidarity, Yesterday and Today.” Women in French Studies. Forthcoming. “Azza Filali et les interférences créatrices.” Hybridations et tensions narratives au Maghreb et en Afrique subsaharienne. Paris : L’Harmattan. Forthcoming. “Nelly Arcan: Women’s Body and What is Left.” The Body in Francophone Literature. Historical, Thematic and Aesthetic Perspectives. El Hadji Malick Ndiaye and Moussa Sow, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 2016. “Zineb Sedira: The Art of Putting Memory Into Action.” Women in French Studies. Special Issue. 2015. 103-116. “In Search of Beauty in Space: Interview with Lalla Essaydi.” Christa Jones and Anissa Talahite-Moodley, eds. Dalhousie French Studies. Special Issue. Vol. 103: 119-127. 2015. Backdated 2014.

Katrina Daly Thompson is Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs the program in African languages and teaches courses in language pedagogy, linguistic anthropology, and ethnography. Her research interests include critical ethnographic approaches to language use, gender, sexuality, and Islam. She is the author of Zimbabwe’s Cinematic Arts: Language, Power, Identity (Indiana University Press, 2012) and Popobawa: Tanzanian Talk, Global Misreadings (Indiana University Press, 2017); and the co-author, with Erin Stiles, of Gendered Lives in the Western Indian Ocean: Islam, Marriage, and Sexuality on the Swahili Coast (Ohio University Press, 2015).