Mahassin Abdel Jalil ✉
Mahassin Abdul Jalil is Assistant Professor at the University of Bahri, Sudan, and PhD candidate at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is affiliated to the Institut des Mondes Africains, Campus Condorcet. She obtained her Master Thesis at the Afro-Asian Studies Institute of the University of Khartoum. Her published papers have focused on themes including academic liberties in authoritarian regimes, the question of Palestine in the Sudanese educational curriculum, death in Sudanese history and culture, and the historiography of Sudanese resistance after the First World War. Her current PhD research focuses on the history of prostitution in 20th Century Sudan. In her work, she has been particularly engaged with the connection between archives and power structures and with the methodology of micro-history, she is member and co-founder of the Sudan Heritage Protection Initiative.
Akwasi Kwarteng Amoako-Gyampah ✉
I am a trained Educator. I received my initial teacher training at Wesley College, Kumasi. I studied for my bachelor’s degree at the University of Ghana, Legon between 2005 and 2009 where I majored in history and minored in political science. I hold an MA (cum laude) and DLitt et Phil qualifications in history from the University of Johannesburg. I am currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History Education, UEW, Ghana, and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of History, University of Johannesburg South Africa. I am also the Vice Dean at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Education, Winneba. My interests in African studies and African history are eclectic. It spans political economy, comparative labour history, economic history, social history of medicine and public health, history of sanitation and public hygiene, history of education, and history of African religious and traditional aetiologies. I have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals on topics spanning, environment, health and sanitation, education, and labour. I recently co-edited with Bea Lundt and Edmond Akwasi Agyeman, a new volume on education, titled, Education in Ghana: History and Politics published in 2023 by Langaa RPCI and distributed internationally by African Books Collective. Apart from preparing a monograph on the history of public health in Ghana, I am also researching the history of teacher education in Ghana.
Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (UG). In 2005 she became the foundation Director of the University of Ghana’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy, and from 2010-2015 she was the Director of the Institute of African Studies. She considers herself an activist scholar, and at the heart of her work are questions of identity and power—within families, institutions, political and religious spaces, and the knowledge industry. Her areas of interest include African Knowledge systems; Higher education; Race and Identity Politics; Gender relations; Masculinities; and Popular Culture. Her most recent book, co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts, is titled Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (Bingley: Emerald Publishing 2021). She co-produced the documentary When Women Speak with Kate Skinner (and directed by Aseye Tamakloe, 2022) as part of a project titled, an “Archive of Activism: Gender and Public History in Postcolonial Ghana”. The project seeks to create a publicly accessible archive of gender activism and “political women”.
Amira Yousif Badri ✉
Amira Y. Badri is senior researcher in socio economic empowerment of women; expert consultant in migration issues, with special focus on migration and African youth. She is professor in sociology of development with publications covering multidisciplinary issues in development studies in Africa, Sudan and Gulf countries. A professional consultant for UNICEF, UNDP and EU in respect to gender based violence, gender equality, poverty alleviation, refugees and social inclusion.
Judith A. Byfield is a Professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. She is the author of The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Post-War Nigeria (Ohio University Press, 2021) and The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, 1890-1940 (Heinemann, 2002). She has co-edited several books including: Global Africa Into the Twenty-First Century (University of California Press, 2017) with
Dorothy Hodgson and Africa and World War II, with Carolyn Brown, Timothy Parsons, Ahmad Sikainga, (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has published articles in edited volumes and journals such as Canadian Journal of African Studies; Journal of African History; Meridians: A Journal on Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism, and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International. Her current research project, Curry Goat and Gari: West Indian Women in 20th Century Nigerian Society, is a social history of Englishspeaking Caribbean women who migrated to and settled in Nigeria as wives of Nigerian men.
Akosua K. Darkwah is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Ghana. Her research focuses primarily on women’s work in the Ghanaian context and has over the years included traders, farmers, factory workers, domestic workers and more recently, members of parliament. Her work in this area appears in a range of journals including Women’s Studies International Forum, International Development Planning Review as well as Media, Culture and Society. She also serves as an Editor for both African Studies Review and Feminist Africa.
Pierre Guidi is historian at the Centre Population & Développement (Ceped), IRD, université Paris Cité. He is conducting his researches in Ethiopia. He published on the history of women’s education and activism in the 20th century. As member of the JEAI Project “Locations of Women Voices and Power in Ethiopia” (IRD, university of Addis Ababa), he starts new researches on the social history of working-class women since the 1940s.
Salvatory S. Nyanto is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Dar es Salaam, and Director in the Office of the Vice Chancellor. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Iowa in the United States of America with a study about slave emancipation, Christian communities, and dissent in western Tanzania. He specializes in Religion and Empire, Slavery and Missionaries, and Christian-Muslim Relations. Nyanto is also a post-doctoral research fellow at Ghent University examining the aftermath of slavery in twentieth-century western Tanzania. The topic of this research project is the life trajectories of formerly enslaved people in Tabora in the twentieth century and the role of slavery in social memory and public discourse. His postdoctoral monograph, Slave Emancipation and Christian Communities in Post-Abolition Tanzania 1878-1978 is under contract with James Currey, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer based in Suffolk, London and Oxford. The publication of the monograph is funded by the European Union through European Research Council (ERC). In addition to his monograph, Nyanto is co-editing a book project, A History of Postcolonial Tanzania: Essays in Honor of Prof. Isaria N. Kimambo which is for consideration with James Currey. Nyanto serves as reviewer and member of the Editorial Board of African History Review, and chair of the editorial team for the book project, A History of Postcolonial Tanzania: Essays in Honor of Prof. Isaria N. Kimambo. He is the coordinator of the AFRAB project, an academically-led 5-year research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and located in the History Department of University College London (UCL) and the Department of History of the University of Dar es Salaam. On March 1, 2023, Dr. Nyanto was appointed member of the Advisory Board of the project “Women at Work: for a comparative history of African female urban professionals (Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Ghana), 1919-1970” (WomatWork), founded by a grant of the European Research. Commission (Grant n. 101045774). The project will run from January 2023 to December 2027, and is housed in the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF) in France and the University of Bologna in Italy. In 2018, the Department of History at the University of Iowa in the USA awarded Dr. Nyanto the William O. Aydelotte Fellowship in recognition of his scholarly excellence for the 2018-2019 academic year. In March 2023, the Faculty of Divinity of the University of Cambridge awarded Dr. Nyanto a Visiting Scholar Position from October 1, 2023, to January 2024.
Tirsit Sahledengle ✉
Tirsit Sahledengle is an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. She obtained her PhD in Dynamics of Interaction between Refugees and Host Communities in Western Ethiopia along the Ethio-Sudanese border. Tirsit’s research interests primarily revolve around gender, forced displacements, peace and conflict dynamics, as well as social cohesion. Throughout her career, Tirsit has actively participated in various national and international research projects, assuming roles such as coordinator, lead researcher, and team member. Her contributions have been instrumental in advancing knowledge and understanding in the fields of gender, conflict, and refugee studies.
Heather J. Sharkey is Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in the history of the modern Middle East and North Africa. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press 2003), which appeared in Arabic as al-‘Aysh ma’a al-isti’mar (Barcode Publishing [Khartoum]) in 2023. Her other books include American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire(Princeton University Press 2008), and A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2017). She has edited Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse University Press 2013); with Mehmet Ali Doğan, American Missionaries
in the Modern Middle East: Foundational Encounters (University of Utah Press, 2011); and with Jeffrey Edward Green, The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). She is currently finishing a book about global microhistory in the Nile Valley.
Meron Zeleke is an Associate Professor and researcher based at Addis Ababa University. Her core areas of research expertise include; gender, migration, gendered industrial labour, religion and conflict. She has published extensively on these themes in internationally renowned journals, authored books, edited special issues of journals, co-edited books and has authored entries in encyclopedias including the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African history. Meron is an international editorial member of Brill -Islamic Africa journal, The North East African Studies Journal NEAS, and the Editor in Chief of Ethiopian Journal of Human Rights (EJHR). Part of her ongoing research projects include migration, gender-based violence and gendered industrial labour.