Juliet Tiwaah Adu Boahen ✉
Juliet Tiwaah Adu Boahen is a Ghanaian trained researcher in History. Her research areas are mainly on maternal and infants health issues, education, gender and female professions in colonial and post- colonial Ghana. Currently, Juliet is a doctoral student at EHESS and as part of the ERC Women at Work Project, Juliet is working on a history of female dressmakers in colonial and post-colonial Ghana, 1919-1970.
Domenico Cristofaro is a research fellow and adjunct lecturer at the University of Bologna. He is a historian of Africa with an anthropological background. His interests encompass urban history, economic history, and the relationship between African planning, political changes, currencies, and commercial and infrastructural transitions. He has published with international publishers and journals such as the International Journal of African Historical Studies and The Journal of African History. Within the WomatWork project, Domenico focuses on studying internal migration patterns in Ghana. His goal is to elucidate the extent to which women who worked in the urban markets of Northern Ghana have influenced the region’s commercial growth and how their professional ethics and networks have evolved between the 1920s and 1970s.
Adèle Hasnaoui ✉
Adèle Hasnaoui is a French PhD student in History at the Université Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris 1. She specialises in the contemporary history of Tanzania, with a focus on urban history, migration studies, and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. During her master’s studies, she wrote a thesis on the urban migrations of Tanganyikan women during the colonial era, followed by a second thesis on prostitution in colonial Tanganyika, primarily using British colonial archives. As part of the Womatwork programme, she is currently researching the history of female food vendors in Tanzania between the 1930s and the 1980s. Her aim is to highlight the role of African women in food trade in East African towns, as they are most of the time overlooked in the historiography, and to precisely describe the gendered features of their activities. She is also particularly interested in exploring how they ran their businesses in an institutionally hostile urban environment.
Karin Pallaver (PhD History, Cagliari, 2005) is Associate Professor of African History at the Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna, where she teaches Modern African History, African History and Institutions and Indian Ocean History. She was previously employed at the British Museum as researcher in the comparative and collaborative project “Money in Africa”. From 2018 to 2020 she was President of the Association of African Studies in Italy (ASAI). Her research interests lie in the social and economic history of 19th-century and early colonial East Africa. Major themes linked to her research are pre-colonial African trade, pre-colonial and colonial currencies, 19th-century urbanism, German and British colonialism in East Africa, and the history of labour (with a special focus on female labour). She has published several book chapters and articles, including in History in Africa, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, African Economic History and African Studies Review. She has recently edited the volume Monetary Transitions. Currencies, Colonialism and African Societies (Palgrave 2022).
Anne Hugon is a senior lecturer in modern African history at Université Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne and a member of Imaf (Institut des Mondes africains). Her research interests focus on Ghana/Gold Coast in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is particularly invested in understanding how colonial rule impacted various aspects of Africans’ lives and experiences, notably regarding health, gender roles and identities, women’s lives, and religion. Her PhD focused on conversion to Methodism in the southern part of the country in the mid 19th century (Un protestantisme africain au XIXe siècle. Stratégies d’évangélisation et modalités de conversion, 1835-1874, Paris, Karthala, 2007). After that she embarked on a research on the history of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood from the 1910s to the 1950s and published her second book, Etre mère en situation coloniale, Gold Coast, années 1910-1950, Paris, Editions de la Sorbonne, 2020. She has edited Histoire des femmes en situation coloniale (Karthala, 2004). She is currently working on the history of juvenile delinquents in the Gold Coast and the ways in which colonial authorities dealt with juvenile delinquency. She is a member of the editorial board of the bilingual journal Clio. Femmes, genre, histoire and has published numerous chapters in collective books and articles in reviews such as XXe siècle, Ghana Studies, or Clio.
Elena Vezzadini is a historian of colonial and early post-independence Sudan. Trained as PhD at the Centre for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (SMI) at the University of Bergen, she has been teaching and researching Middle Eastern and African History in Italy, France, Norway and Sweden before to be hired in 2015 as permanent fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the Institute of African Worlds (IMAF), Campus Condorcet. During the first fifteen years as a researcher, she has worked on the social history of the first nationalist movement in Sudan and the 1924 Revolution, and different issues related to that event, including racial relations, the army, education, transnationalism from below, the development of secret societies in Sudan, and traumatic memory. For her first published book “Lost Nationalism. Revolution, Memory and Resistance in Colonial Sudan”, published in 2015, she has been the winner of the Bethwell Ogot prize for the best book on East African Studies by the ASA. After 2015, besides having two children, she has been working on the social history of Sudan, including the development of trade unions in the 1940s and 1950s, the women’s movement at the time of independence, and the connection between the press, the left and the Sudanese Women Union during the 1950s. Finally, between 2021 and 2023, she has been the director of her research centre, the Institute of African World.
Daniel Worku ✉
My name is Daniel Worku Kebede. I am an Ethiopian. I have been a lecturer of history for a decade at Arba Minch University in the Department of History and Heritage Management. I received my Bachelor and Masters degrees from Addis Ababa University, History Department, with distinction. My thesis was on women’s role and status in Mainline Evangelical Churches in Addis Ababa, and I accomplished it with a rarely awarded grade of “Excellent”. Broadly, social and religious history in the 20th century is my main research areas. Specifically, I have an interest in women and evangelical Christianity; moreover, the role and status of slaves, laborers, and marginalized groups both in the economy and historiography. I have been involved in and presented papers at a number of seminars and am the principal investigator of two researches funded by the university. So far, I have made two publications: one is Women in the Ethiopian Pentecostal Movement, and the other is a historical appraisal of slavery and abolition in Ethiopia. I am also excited about the Women at Work Project and its great opportunity to collaborate with other students and scholars in the program to conduct meaningful research in one of the most neglected areas of women and their labor activities in urban areas. Despite women having a great socio-economic contribution to society, their role has always been undervalued, and their history, too, is understudied. Hence, I envisioned reconstructing the history of women laborers from their perspective by weaving oral sources together with different threads of valuable written sources to shed more light on their views, experiences, challenges, and success stories that should have been told many years ago. I am confident that our team in this project will be able to make a pioneering contribution to carving out women’s labor history in unprecedented and comparative fashion across the different regions of Africa.