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Meet the Center for African Studies
Graduate Affiliates!
Please note that the following affiliates include only those graduate students who have forwarded their pictures and bios. There are many more affiliates who have not done so as of yet.
| Lincoln Addison | Anthropology | |
| Kate Burlingham | History | |
| Jill Campaiola | Media Studies | |
| Stella Capoccia | Geography | |
| Omotayo Jolaosho | Anthropology | |
| Chaunetta Jones | Anthropology | |
| Mary Kay Jou | Social Work | |
| Samuel Ledermann | Geography | |
| Lauren Saville | Anthropology | |
| Debby Scott | Geography | |
| Natalie Tevethia | Anthropology | |
| Laura Ann Twagira | History | |
| Johanna Rossi Wagner | Italian | |
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| Lincoln Addison is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. His research focuses on Zimbabwean plantation workers in northern South Africa. Specifically, he is interested in forms of self-organization among these workers through such practices as worship, leisure and recreation. His work brings together social history and political economy to understand how Zimbabwean migrant workers form a differentiated community inflected with power relations at multiple scales. Lincoln has helped organize two academic conferences as a CAS graduate affiliate. | |
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| Kate Burlingham is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History in the final year of her degree program at Rutgers University. Her dissertation, for which she conducted fieldwork in Angola, South Africa, Portugal, and the United States, is about the history of Congregational missionaries in Angola from 1880 - 1975. Kate is also a Subject Specialist for the JSTOR/Aluka project entitled, "Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa," which is digitizing archival holdings from around the world related to the anti-colonial battles fought throughout southern Africa from 1950-1991. She is highly proficient in Portuguese and Spanish and can read and communicate French. Kate was an Africanist Doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and has received numerous other grants and fellowships in support of her research and writing from foundations and organizations in the United States and Portugal. | |
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| Jill Campaiola is a Ph.D. Candidate in Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information. Her dissertation investigates the extent to which Moroccan TV dramas are shaped by local, national and global cultural flows such as wider influences from the Arab world, the old colonial power – France – and from American popular culture. The purpose of her research is to understand how television drama can be used as a form of mental emigration in the era of globalization. She is a 2009 Dissertation Proposal Development Fellow through the Social Science Research Council. | |
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| Stella Capoccia is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography. Her research looks at the role that international wildlife priorities play on wildlife management and conservation in Kenya. In particular, her work explores how a focus on animals protection unfolds in the larger conservation strategy. She received support from the Waterman Graduate Travel Fellowship and the Department of Human Ecology for the initial stages of her work including topic and site selection. The Department of Geography and Department of Human Ecology currently support her full research project. | |
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| Robin P. Chapdelaine is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History. Her current dissertation project is the development of "An Intellectual History of the 1929 Aba Women's War: A Case Study of Comparative Women's Scholarship." The dissertation will address the historiographical shifts represented in scholarship on the 1929 Aba Women's War with an emphasis on how it influenced the way feminist studies, women's and gender studies, and African scholarship developed. Contested theoretical approaches will be surveyed by highlighting the junctures at which varying interpretations move from one significant mode of analysis to another. | |
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| Christina Doonan is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science. With an emphasis in political theory and women and politics, her work focuses on US foreign policy as it relates to women who engage in sex work. Particularly, she is studying the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and its concomitant ‘anti-prostitution pledge,’ the strange alliances around this issue between feminists and the Christian Right, and what it has meant for organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa working with sex workers. | |
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| Omotayo Jolaosho is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate School-New Brunswick. Her dissertation will investigate the role of embodied performance in community mobilizations for social change. Preliminary research in South Africa has shown that citizens are adapting anti-apartheid freedom songs and political dances as well as creating new expressive forms in response to present conditions. She plans to examine the continued salience of these performance protest forms and situate contemporary performance activism within a longer historical trajectory- a project that is relevant not just to South Africa but also for understanding protest performances as a global phenomenon. | |
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| Chaunetta Jones is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. Her medical anthropological research investigates how economic inequalities and structural barriers impact responses to antiretroviral treatment (ART) among people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWA) in Grahamstown, South Africa. Within a context of high unemployment, many PLWA rely on government disability subsidies as their only source of income. The terms of the disability grant, however, have created a particularly complex dilemma as patients are modifying their adherence to ART to maintain disability status in order to continue to receive the grant. This situation has significant public health implications and also informs our greater theoretical understandings about how people respond to health crises within resource-poor communities. With funding from Fulbright-IIE, Chaunetta completed fourteen months of fieldwork in South Africa and is currently writing her dissertation. | |
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| Mary Kay Jou is a Ph.D. Candidate at Rutgers University School of Social Work, focusing on Social Policy with a specialty in immigration policy and anti-terror legislation. She teaches as an Adjunct Professor at both Rutgers and Monmouth Universities. For the last nine years, she has been working with refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers, survivors of torture and detainees. She has run school-based programs for refugee and immigrant children in three public school districts. After 9/11, she was recruited to work with Arab, Muslim and South Asian communities. She conducts psychological evaluations on survivors of torture who are seeking both defensive and affirmative asylum. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she served in Mali, West Africa from 1996-1998. She has spent the last three summers conducting Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP) cross border conflict resolution workshops in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Rwanda. In terms of research, she is currently supervising an independent study regarding the impact of U.S. Immigration Detention and Deportation on Liberians with an MSW student from Monmouth University. Most recently, she began working as a Family Social Worker for African immigrants living with HIV and AIDS in Harlem, NY. She is fluent in French and Bambara. | |
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| David Kuranga Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science. He
currently teaches Politics, Economic Development, and International
Relations. In addition to teaching he is the Managing Director of Kuranga
and Associates Global Consultancy [www.kaglobal.net] that services public
and private sector investments in emerging economies, particularly
sub-Saharan Africa. Before furthering his academic pursuits David served
on the Delegation of Nigeria to the United Nations. He is well-traveled and is presently actively engaged in his research on the impact of supranational organizations in sustaining peace and stability in West Africa. He has conducted field research in Nigeria and is now in the process of completing his dissertation. |
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| Samuel “Saemi” Ledermann is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography. His research explores the socio-economic impacts surrounding the boom of certified organic cotton production in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, his doctoral research includes fieldwork on organic and conventional cotton farmers in Tanzania in order to investigate the relationship between organic cotton production and inequalities. His work pays explicit attention to the importance of space through the combination of spatial and mixed methods. Besides his dissertation work, his (previous) work includes research on the World Trade Organization (WTO), agricultural development, and impacts of international trade in the US and sub-Saharan Africa. | |
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| Mahriana Rofheart is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Program in Comparative Literature. Her dissertation, entitled "Don't Abandon 'Our Boat': Shifting Perceptions of Emigration in Contemporary Senegalese Literature and Song" examines the way that emigration and return are addressed in novels in French and hip-hop music in Wolof. Her work demonstrates that these contemporary works devise local and global networks to address the dislocations caused by emigration; the possibilities these texts imagine are entirely different from the often tragic outcomes to migration that earlier Senegalese texts portray. Mahriana is the recepient a Dissertation Fellowship from the School of Arts and Sciences' Mellon Graduate Fellowships in the Humanities 2009 competition; the fellowship will provide funding as she completes her dissertation during 2009-2010. | |
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| Lauren Saville is currently interested in studying mothering style in primates. She will be looking at differences in mothering style in baboons in Kenya and if cortisol levels contribute to these differences. She previously did field work in Tanzania with a troop of vervet monkeys looking at grooming and aggression. She has also done lab work looking at squirrel monkeys and their ability to recognize pictures. | |
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| Debby Scott is a first year Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Geography. She anticipates working on issues relating to food sovereignty and the food sovereignty movement in Africa and international environmental law. | |
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| Kaia Niambi Shivers is a Ph.D. Candidate in Journalism and Media Studies in the School of Communication and Information. A former journalist who wrote extensively about African Diasporic cultures around the world, her research focuses on the third largest film industry, Nollywood, and how it is distributed, consumed, and interpreted by African Diaspora communities of the United States. | |
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| Natalie Tevethia is a first-year student in the anthropology graduate program studying under Professor Angelique Haugerud. Her proposed dissertation research will focus on the construction of gender and identity in the corporate social responsibility efforts of international chocolate and cocoa manufacturers following widespread allegations of exploited child labor in West Africa’s cocoa farms. Within this context, women farmers are becoming the site of struggle over who bears responsibility for child labor practices in the volatile economic cycles of the global cocoa market. Cocoa is Ghana’s second largest export; however, unpredictable cocoa prices on the international market coupled with restrictions on agricultural extension services mandated by structural adjustment have repeatedly threatened the livelihoods of Ghana’s smallholder cocoa farmers. Her research explores how definitions of the productive and reproductive responsibilities of women cocoa farmers are being used to frame the boundaries of moral and economic debates surrounding issues of child labor in the supply chain of the global chocolate industry. She examines gender ideologies present in the goals, methodologies and content of training programs targeted towards Ghanaian women farmers. In addition, she explores how women farmers and their families make sense of these sometimes conflicting messages about rural women’s—and their children’s—responsibilities, identities, and needs. | |
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| Laura Ann Twagira is a Ph.D. Candidate in African and Women's and Gender History. She is currently working on her dissertation project "Invisible Labor Migrants, Savvy Development Partners: Gender at the Office du Niger (Mali) c. 1930-1990." Her research examines how forced family migration and labor for colonial agricultural projects in the former French Soudan (contemporary Mali) affected women's participation in development projects well into the post-independence era. She looks in particular at the Office du Niger or the Niger River Bend Agricultural Scheme. In the dissertation she will trace women's changing strategies and stances towards colonial intervention and postcolonial era international development agencies. She is interested in the ways in which memories of how the Office bureaucracy worked in the past influenced the way women in the region became savvy partners of postcolonial development. She will be leaving for Mali in the fall of 2009 on a Fulbright-Hays dissertation research grant. She was previously a Peace Corps volunteer in Kalake, Mali and worked primarily with local women's associations, nutrition education, and infant and maternal health projects. More recently she completed an intensive language program in Bamana at the 2007 Summer Cooperative in African Languages Institute at the University of Urbana-Champaign. As a member of the CAS Graduate Affiliates, she helped to organize two Graduate conferences at Rutgers: "Resonances of Resistance," which was held in December 2008 and "Rethinking the African State," which was held in April 2009. | |
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| Johanna Rossi Wagner is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Italian. Her research looks at Postcolonial Literature in Italian written by women authors from the Horn of Africa, specifically from the former Italian colonies of Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia. The Italian colonial campaign involved East Africa for more than sixty years (1880-1941), but it has been relegated to the margins of Italian historiography due to closed archives and one-sided fascist rhetoric surrounding its happening. Her project looks at the recently emerging work of these authors as both more accurate narratives of the colonized experience and forms of resistance to the perpetuated myth of Italy's "good colonialism." The works under investigation also map out strategies for community building and cultural celebration amidst the difficult realities of the African diaspora. | |
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Adryan R. Wallace is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science, majoring in women and politics with minors in comparative politics and African politicaltheory. Her research focuses on the relationships between income generating activities and constructs of gender among the Hausa in Nigeria and Ghana. In the summer of 2008 she conducted pre-dissertation research in Kano, Nigeria and Tamale, Ghana to ascertain how Hausa women are constructing political space. The ways in which interpretations of Islam impact nationalism and state institutions are also explored in her work. Most recently she was a participant in the Eight Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research Workshop in June of 2009. She is integrating the outcomes of the workshop into the development of her dissertation proposal. | |
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