SOAS University of London is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury area of central London.
Zeinab Badawi is a Sudanese-British television and radio journalist. She was the first presenter of the ITV Morning News, and co-presented Channel 4 News with Jon Snow from 1989 to 1998 before joining BBC News. Badawi was the presenter of World News Today broadcast on both BBC Four and BBC World News, and Reporters, a weekly showcase of reports from the BBC. In 2021, Badawi was appointed as president of SOAS University of London.
Ayesha Siddiqa (Urdu: عائِشہ صِدّیقہ; born April 7, 1966), is a Pakistani political scientist, and an author who serves as a research associate at the SOAS South Asia Institute.
Mary Bucholtz is professor of linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. Bucholtz's work focuses largely on language use in the United States, and specifically on issues of language and youth; language, gender, and sexuality; African American English; and Mexican and Chicano Spanish.
Deniz Kandiyoti is an author and an academic of research in the fields of gender relations and developmental politics in the Middle East, specifically Turkey. She holds a PhD from London School of Economics.
Sylvia Rosila Tamale is a Ugandan academic, and human rights activist in Uganda. She was the first woman dean in the law faculty at Makerere University, Uganda.
Shirin M. Rai, is an interdisciplinary scholar who works across the political science and international relations boundaries. She is known for her research on the intersections between international political economy, globalisation, post-colonial governance, institutions and processes of democratisation and gender regimes. She was a professor of politics and international studies at the University of Warwick, and is the founding director of Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID).
Lynne Muthoni Wanyeki is a Kenyan political scientist, human rights activist, journalist, and the current Regional Director of Open Society Foundation's Africa Regional Office. Wanyeki is the former Regional Director of Amnesty International's Regional Office for East Africa, the Horn, and the Great Lakes. She is also the former Executive Director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET).
The African Gender Institute (AGI) is a feminist research and teaching group that studies issues related to gender in Africa. It has become a department at the University of Cape Town (UCT), administered within the School of African and Gender Studies, Social Anthropology and Linguistics. The AGI has its own staff and has a unique degree of independence from UCT.
Naila Kabeer is an Indian-born British Bangladeshi social economist, research fellow, writer and Professor at the London School of Economics. She was also president of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE) from 2018 to 2019. She is on the editorial committee of journals such as Feminist Economist, Development and Change, Gender and Development, Third World Quarterly and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies. She works primarily on poverty, gender and social policy issues. Her research interests include gender, poverty, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihoods, social protection, focused on South and South East Asia.
Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a Nigerian-British feminist activist, writer and policy advocate. She was first lady of Ekiti State, Nigeria as wife of Ekiti State governor Kayode Fayemi from 2018 to 2022. She previously served as first lady from 2010 to 2014 during her husband's first term in office. In 2001, she co-founded the African Women's Development Fund (AWDF), the first Pan-African grant-making organisation. She serves as a UN Women Nigeria Senior Advisor, and was appointed as a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College, University of London in 2017. She is CEO of Above Whispers Limited, and runs an online community called Abovewhispers.com.
Wangui wa Goro is a Kenyan academic, social critic, researcher, translator and writer based in the UK. As a public intellectual she has an interest in the development of African languages and literatures, as well as being consistently involved with the promotion of literary translation internationally, regularly speaking and writing on the subject. Professor Wangui wa Goro is a writer, translator, translation studies scholar and pioneer who has lived and lectured in different parts of the world including the UK, USA, Germany and South Africa.
Funmi Olonisakin is a British Nigerian scholar, who is a Professor of leadership, peace and conflict at King's College London, and an Extra-Ordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria. She is the founder and former Director of the African Leadership Centre (ALC) founded on the principle of Pan-Africanism to build the next generation of leaders and scholars on the African continent with core transformational values. Olonisakin is the Programme Director of the ALC's Master of Science (MSc) programmes on Leadership, peace and security. She is a research associate of Political Sciences at the University of Pretoria, and was an Andrew Mellon Foundation distinguished scholar and a distinguished fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP). She is currently an appointed member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) advisory group of experts. on the review of the UN Peace-building Architecture.
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah is a Ghanaian feminist writer and blogger. She co-founded award-winning blog Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women and has written for The Guardian and Open Democracy. Sekyiamah is the Director for Communications manager at the Association for Women's Rights in Development and a member of the Black Feminism Forum Working Group which organised the historic first Black Feminist Forum in Bahia, Brazil.
Hilina Berhanu Degefa is an Ethiopian women's rights activist and researcher. She is a co-founder of The Yellow Movement, a youth-led feminist advocacy and empowerment program based in Addis Ababa and Mekelle University. She was a 2015 recipient of a Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders, the youngest to receive the honor at the age of 22. Hilina is also a Women Deliver Young Leaders Fellow, class of 2020. She is the first Ethiopian civil society representative to brief the UN Security Council.
Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg is an Executive in Residence at Schmidt Futures. Before that she was Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD). Wanjiru is also the Founder and past Executive Director of Akili Dada, a leadership incubator for African girls and young women and a former Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco.
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Global Development and Anthropology at King's College London.
Emily Awino Onyango is a Kenyan priest who became the first female bishop in the Anglican Church of Kenya in January 2021. Prior to becoming a bishop, she taught theology at St. Paul's University in Limaru, Kenya. She attended the founding conference for the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in Ghana in 1989, and is a member of the Kenyan chapter of the Circle.
Marilyn ('Lyn') Ossome is an academic, specialising in feminist political theory and feminist political economics. She is currently Senior Research Associate of at the University of Johannesburg and a member of the advisory board for the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, amongst other accolades. She is an editorial board member of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, and in 2021, she co-edited the volume Labour Questions in the Global South. She serves on the executive committee for the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). She is the author of Gender, Ethnicity and Violence in Kenya’s Transitions to Democracy: States of Violence.
Nici Nelson is an Africanist, social anthropologist and a Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She obtained a PhD on Kikuyu women in Nairobi, Kenya, from the University of London in 1978 and has published on various fields such as urban anthropology, gender and sexuality, and marriage and households in East Africa. Nelson was President of the African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK) in the years 2002-2004 and was one of the recipients of the ASAUK Outstanding African Studies Award in 2015-2016.
