The 2019 CHCI Africa Humanities Workshop features academics and artists from around the African continent and specialists in Africa from around the world. We are excited that this accomplished group will be leading our seminars and workshops throughout the conference in Addis Ababa.

Akosua Adomako Ampofo. Photo credit: Akosua-Asamoabea Ampofo

Akosua Adomako Ampofo

Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon

Akosua Adomako Ampofo is a Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana. Her teaching, research, and activism address issues of African knowledge systems, higher education, identity politics, gender relations, and popular culture. Adomako Ampofo is the President of the African Studies Association of Africa, Immediate past Co-President of the Research Committee on Women and Society of the International Sociological Association, and Co-Editor of the Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog. She is a fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences and numerous national and international associations, CSOs and boards including the Ghana Domestic Violence Coalition, the Network for Women’s rights in Ghana, the Council for Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), and the (US) African Studies Association. She has been a Junior Fulbright Scholar, a New Century Fulbright Scholar, and a Senior Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence. Professor Adomako Ampofo has been a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Belagio centre. In 2010 she was awarded the Feminist Activism Award by Sociologists for Women and Society, and, in 2015, she was the African Studies Association (of America’s) African Studies Review Distinguished lecturer.

Carli Coetzee. Photo credit: Kolawole Ogungbaduro

Carli Coetzee

Journal of African Cultural Studies

Carli Coetzee is the editor of Negotiating the Past and Afropolitanism: Reboot, and the author of Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid and many articles on African literature and on the ethics of north-south interactions. Her monograph Written Under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa will be published in 2019 in the African Articulations Series (Boydell & Brewer/James Currey), as will the Routledge Handbook of African Literature co-edited with Moradewun Adejunmobi. She is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Literature, Language and Media at Wits University, and a Research Associate at SOAS, University of London. Her work as the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies is part of a larger activist project that seeks to change publishing patterns that privilege northern-based scholars and institutions. She frequently takes part in research and early career mentoring workshops hosted and designed by African universities and organisations.

Simon Gikandi. Photo credit: Juandamarie Gikandi

Simon Gikandi

Princeton University

Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University. Gikandi is currently the first vice-president of the MLA in 2018 and will be the association's president in 2019. Gikandi's major fields of research and teaching are Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; literary and critical theory; the black Atlantic and the African diaspora; and the English novel. His current research projects are on slavery and modernity, African philology, and cultures of the novel. His books include Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. His book Slavery and the Culture of Tastewas winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award; winner of the Melville J. Herskovits Award; and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2018, Gikandi was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Elizabeth Giorgis

Elizabeth Giorgis

Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Center - Addis Ababa University

Elizabeth Giorgis is Associate Professor of Art History, Criticism and Theory in the College of Performing and Visual Art and the Center for African Studies at Addis Ababa University. She is also the Director of the Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Center at Addis Ababa University. She served as the Dean of the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Art and as Director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies of Addis Ababa University. She is the editor and author of several publications. She has curated several exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum, Gebre Kristos Desta Center, more recently an exhibition of Julie Mehretu’s work titled Julie, the Addis Show, the exhibition Addis Ababa the Enigma of the New and the Modern that showcased four artists who engaged the changing cityscape of Addis Ababa, and an exhibition of the Danish Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. She is currently finalizing a book called A History of Modern Art of Ethiopia, which is the first comprehensive monographic study of Ethiopian visual modernism within a broader social and intellectual history.

Catarina Gomes

Catarina Gomes

Angolan Catholic University, Centre for Sociological Studies and Research

Catarina Gomes holds a degree in Anthropology with a specialization in Social and Cultural Anthropology as well as a master degree in Sociology and a PhD in Sociology with a specialization in Sociology of the State, the Law and Administration. Gomes conducted her post-doctoral research in the intersection between sociology and postcolonial studies. She is a researcher at Centro de Estudos Sociais, Coimbra University, Portugal, and co-founder and co-cordinator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Lab at the Cathloic University of Angola as well as a co-organizer of the International Conference 'Public Humanities: Thinking Freedom in the African University', funded by CODESRIA. Her recent publications include African Citizenship Aspirations, co-organized with Cesaltina Abreu; As time goes by or how far till Banjul: African Citizenship Aspirations, co-edited with Cesaltina Abreu, (Journal of Citizenship Studies, Special Issue); and On freedom, being and transcendence: the quest for relevance in higher education (Kronos, Special Issue).

Julie Mehretu. Photo credit: Teju Cole

Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu is a world renowned painter, born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1970 who lives and works in New York City and Berlin. She received a Master’s of Fine Art with honors from The Rhode Island School of Design in 1997. Mehretu is a recipient of many awards, including the The MacArthur Award (2005) and the US Department of State Medal of Arts Award (2015). She is best known for her large-scale paintings that take the abstract energy, topography, and sensibility of global urban landscapes and political unrest as a source of inspiration. She has shown her work extensively in international and national solo and group exhibitions and is represented in public and private collections around the world. Recent projects include completing two large-scale paintings for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Atrium in September 2017, entitled HOWL eon (I, II). She is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Mshai Mwangola

Mshai Mwangola

African Leadership Centre, Nairobi

Dr. Mshaï Mwangola is a performance scholar / oraturist with a research affiliation to the African Leadership Centre (ALC), a joint programme of Kings College London and University of Nairobi, based in Nairobi Kenya. She has been a member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) since 1998. Until June 2016, she worked as a member of the research and teaching faculty at the ALC, where she also held the position of Research and Communication Officer for two years. She continues to teach at the ALC and serves as Secretary of its Research Ethics Committee. Previously, Mwangola worked as an Academic Planning Strategist with the Academic Planning Unit of the proposed Faculty of Arts and Sciences (East Africa) of Aga Khan University. Mwangola’s intellectual work is characterised by her practice of performance as a way of making meaning for the purpose of advocacy, research, and pedagogy. She is invested in enhancing partnerships between intellectuals working in the academic, policy, and practice spheres. In this regard, she serves on the Board of Trustees of Uraia Trust (Kenya’s largest non-state national Civic Education programme), which she has chaired since 2013. She also is involved in various policy initiatives in the cultural sphere.

James Ogude

James Ogude

Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship - University of Pretoria

Professor James Ogude is a Senior Research Fellow and the Director at the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria. Until his recent appointment he was a Professor of African Literature and Cultures in the School of Literature, Language and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he worked since 1994, serving as the Head of African Literature and also Assistant Dean – Research, in the Faculty of Humanities. He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation and he has edited a total of six books and one anthology of African stories, the most recent edited book is: Ubuntu and Personhood (Africa World Press, 2018).

Dagmawi Woubshet

Dagmawi Woubshet

University of Pennsylvania

A scholar of African American literature and art, Dagmawi Woubshet works at the intersections of African American, LGBTQ, and African studies. These overlapping areas of inquiry inform his scholarship and research, including his book The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS, and the co-edited volume Ethiopia: Literature, Art, and Culture, a special issue of Callaloo. His writings have appeared in Transition, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Aperture, The Atlantic, and African Lives: An Anthology. He is currently completing his second book, Here Be Saints: James Baldwin’s Late-Style, and the first English translation of Sebhat Gebre Egziabher’s 1966 Amharic novel, ሰባተኛው መላክ Säbatägnaw Mälak [The Seventh Angel]. Woubshet is an associate editor of Callaloo and has served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He has been a fellow at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, and, as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Modern Art Museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he curated Julie Mehretu: The Addis Show (2016). He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010. Before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, Woubshet taught at Cornell University where he was named one of “The 10 Best Professors at Cornell.”