Ousseina D. Alidou is Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters, School of Arts and Sciences-Rutgers University. She teaches in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literature at Rutgers University. [1] She received a Master of Arts degree in linguistics at the Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger, and a MA degree in applied linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington where she also obtained a theoretical linguistics PhD. She was a member of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and the 2022 president of the African Studies Association. [2]
Her twin sister Hassana Alidou was Niger's ambassador to the United States from 2015 to 2019. [3]
Alidou published many scholarly articles and books including: [7]
Sandra G. Harding is an American philosopher of feminist and postcolonial theory, epistemology, research methodology, and philosophy of science. She directed the UCLA Center for the Study of Women from 1996 to 2000, and co-edited Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society from 2000 to 2005. She is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education and Gender Studies at UCLA and a Distinguished Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. In 2013 she was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize by the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S).
Paul Gilroy is an English sociologist and cultural studies scholar who is the founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Race and Racism at University College London (UCL). Gilroy is the 2019 winner of the €660,000 Holberg Prize, for "his outstanding contributions to a number of academic fields, including cultural studies, critical race studies, sociology, history, anthropology and African-American studies".
Leila Ahmed is an Egyptian-American scholar of Islam. In 1992 she published her book Women and Gender in Islam, which is regarded as a pioneering historical analysis of the position of women in Arab Muslim societies. She became the first professor of women's studies in religion at Harvard Divinity School in 1999, and has held the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity chair since 2003. She was later awarded the Victor S. Thomas Research Professor of Divinity in 2020.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is a Malawian historian, literary critic, novelist, short-story writer and blogger at The Zeleza Post. He was (2009) president of the African Studies Association. He was the Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Quinnipiac University. He served as Vice Chancellor of the United States International University Africa from 2016 to 2021, located in Nairobi, Kenya. He served as Associate Provost and North Star Distinguished Professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio from 2021 to 2023, and was appointed to his current position as Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives at Howard University in October 2023.
Norman Arthur Stillman, also Noam, is an American academic, historian, and Orientalist, serving as the emeritus Schusterman-Josey Professor and emeritus Chair of Judaic History at the University of Oklahoma. He specializes in the intersection of Jewish and Islamic culture and history, and in Oriental and Sephardi Jewry, with special interest in the Jewish communities in North Africa. His major publications are The Jews of Arab Lands: a History And Source Book and Sephardi Religious Responses to Modernity. In the last few years, Stillman has been the executive editor of the "Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World", a project that includes over 2000 entries in 5 volumes.
Arif Dirlik was a Turkish-American historian who published on historiography and political ideology in modern China, as well as issues in modernity, globalization, and postcolonial criticism. Dirlik received a BSc in electrical engineering at Robert College, Istanbul in 1964 and a PhD in history at the University of Rochester in 1973.
The African Studies Association (ASA) is a US-based association of scholars, students, practitioners, and institutions with an interest in the continent of Africa. Founded in 1957, the ASA is the leading organization of African Studies in North America, with a global membership of approximately 2000. The association's headquarters are at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The ASA holds annual conferences and virtual events for its members year-round.
The Union for Democracy and Social Progress is a centrist political party in Niger. With its support base in the Tuareg people of northern Niger, the party's history is tied to that of the Tuareg rights movements which surrounded the Tuareg insurgencies of 1990–95 and 2007–09. Its slogan, "Amana", is a Hausa language word for "Trust"
Rey Chow is a cultural critic, specializing in 20th-century Chinese fiction and film and postcolonial theory. Educated in Hong Kong and the United States, she has taught at several major American universities, including Brown University. Chow is currently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature in Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke University.
Mounira Maya Charrad is a Franco-Tunisian sociologist who serves as associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Decoloniality is a school of thought that aims to delink from Eurocentric knowledge hierarchies and ways of being in the world in order to enable other forms of existence on Earth. It critiques the perceived universality of Western knowledge and the superiority of Western culture, including the systems and institutions that reinforce these perceptions. Decolonial perspectives understand colonialism as the basis for the everyday function of capitalist modernity and imperialism.
Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
The Africa-America Institute (AAI) is an international education organization dedicated to advancing the continent's development through higher education and skills training, convening activities, and promoting greater engagement between Africa and the United States.
Hassana Alidou was a Nigerien diplomat who served as Ambassador to the United States and Canada from 2015 to 2019. She then became the first scholar in residence for the Union Institute and University Institute for Social Justice.
Hamsou Garba was a Nigerien singer.
Wendy Onyinye Osefo is a Nigerian-American political commentator, public affairs academic, and television personality. She is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Education, and a main cast member of The Real Housewives of Potomac. Wendy practices in the field of journalism and has received rewards recognizing her contributions to the field of journalism.
Alice J. Kang is Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Bouli Kakasi is a Nigerien singer.
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a Puerto Rican academic who specializes in research of the Caribbean. She holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair at Vassar College.
Pauline Ada Uwakweh is a Nigerian writer and academic. Writing as Pauline Onwubiko, she published Running for Cover (1988), a children's novel giving a child's-eye view of the Nigerian civil war. She is a Professor of Literature in the English Department at North Carolina A&T State University. Her specialism is African writing and literature from the African diaspora, particularly women's writing.