Dr. Bamba Ndiaye is the creator and host of The Africanist Podcast. He is an Assistant Professor of African Studies at Emory University’s Oxford College and a former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Humanities at the University of Louisville. His research interests are at the intersection of Black Atlantic social movements, critical race theory, Black Atlantic popular cultures, mobility, and Pan-Africanism. He is the author/co-author of several peer-reviewed publications in leading interdisciplinary journals including “Social Movements and the Challenges of Resources Mobilization in the Digital Era” (in Africa Today), “Mbas Mi”: Fighting COVID-19 Through Music in Senegal” in African Studies Review and “African American Evangelic Missions and Social Reforms in the Congo” in Reflections of Leadership and Institution in Africa (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). He is currently working on his book manuscript entitled Black Social Movements in the Digital Era.
Jenny Parker, PhD
Jenny Parker is working on a PhD in Anthropology with a minor in African Studies at Indiana University. She has a Masters degree in French from the University of Wisconsin and an advertising degree from The University of Texas. She has taught English and French on three continents (France, Senegal and the U.S.) and brings years of marketing and promotional experience to WARA. During her years at Indiana University, Jenny helped organize the Graduate Students of African Studies Symposium 2 years in a row and contributed to outreach in IU’s African Studies Program. Additionally, she worked in the Anthropology Department revamping their website and creating promotional material for the department. She assisted in the African Studies Program with their winning 2018 Title VI grant. Ms. Parker’s love for the continent of Africa began during her Master’s coursework and led to a two-year residence at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal.
João Resende-Santos, PhD
João Resende-Santos is Associate Professor of International Studies at Bentley University in Waltham Massachusetts, USA. He received his PhD in Political Science from Harvard University. Prior to Bentley, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh. From 2009 to 2011, he served as Dean of the School of Business and Governance/Escola de Negócios e Governação (ENG), University of Cape Verde (UNICV).
His research areas include international relations theory, US foreign policy, development policy, political economy of Cape Verde, diaspora engagement, and Cape Verde foreign relations. Prof. Resende-Santos is also active as a policy practitioner and international consultant in the areas of economic development policy, entrepreneurship, and trade policy. He has been a consultant for the African Development Bank, the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and the Government of Cape Verde. In 2010 was a member of the National Task Force for the II Compact of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA-2) for the Government of Cabo Verde. In 2013, he was Team Leader and Lead Author of Cape Verde’s Diagnostic Trade Integration Study. His first book, Neorealism, the State, and the Modern Mass Army, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. He is co-author of the recently published Innovation Africa: Emerging Hubs of Excellence, which is part of a broader set of initiatives based on the Africa Innovation Summit. His most recent research appears in “Cape Verde: Rethinking Diaspora in Development Policy,” International Migration October 2015.
Cheikh Thiam, PhD
Cheikh Thiam is a Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College and the author and editor of several volumes on Negritude and African philosophy and literature including Return to the Kingdom of Childhood: Re-envisioning the philosophical relevance of Negritude, the first book-length study of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s theory of Negritude as philosophy. He is also the author of Epistemologies from the South: Negritude, Modernity, and the Idea of Africa, that was recently published by the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press. Cheikh Thiam’s scholarship focuses on the ways in which Africa-centered epistemologies engage with colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial intellectual traditions; question the language divide in Africana studies; interrogate anti-Black racism in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies; and shape conceptions of being and identity in Africa and the African diaspora. He is a former associate editor of Research in African Literature and editor of African Studies Review, the journal of the African Studies Association.
Baba Badj, PhD
Baba Badji is a Senegalese American poet, translator, and researcher, and an Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow Associate with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ) and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He is also an Inaugural James Baldwin Artist and Scholar in Residence at the University of Virginia’s Department of French. Badji earned his PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow and an Edward A. Bouchet Honor Society Fellow. Besides English and French, he is fluent in Wolof, Mending, and Diola, and he calls on these languages in his writing. Badji’s first full-length poetry manuscript, Ghost Letters, was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Awards. Badji’s Ghost Letters, Volume II is in progress. His novel, Madame Diawara, is also in progress, and several scholarly works are forthcoming.
DR. PENDA BA
Mame-Penda Ba is deputy dean of the Faculty of Law and Political science and professor of political science at Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis–Senegal. She received her “agrégation,” which is the highest teaching diploma in the French system, in political science. Prof. Ba is currently the Scientific Director of the PhD program on Political Science. She also heads the Laboratoire d’analyse des sociétés et pouvoirs / Afrique-Diasporas (Research Laboratory on Societies and Powers Africa/Diaspora, LASPAD). Her research interests cover political sociology of religion, the analysis of public policies, gender studies, and the social genesis and dynamics of the State in Africa.
Amy Niang, PhD
Amy Niang is Senior Programme Officer and Head of the Research Programme. She is specialised in African Political History and Political Thought. Her work also examines Africa’s International relations and the geopolitics of security in the Sahel. Amy is the author of The Postcolonial African State in Transition: Stateness and Modes of Sovereignty (2018); co- editor of Identités sahéliennes en temps de crise: histoires, enjeux et perspectives (with Baz Lecocq, 2019) and Researching Peacebuilding in Africa: Reflections on Theory, Fieldwork and Context (with Ismail Rashid, 2020). Her work has also been published in many journals and edited collections and she serves on a range of editorial boards. Prior to assuming her current position, she taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Rabat, and has also held visiting positions and fellowships at various universities in Latin America, Africa, Europe, and North America. Niang is Associate Professor of Political Science currently on leave from the Africa Institute of Sharjah.
Sónia Semedo, PhD
Dr Sónia Semedo holds a Ph.D. in Physics Engineering and an Advanced Specialisation in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Coimbra, Portugal. She also holds a master’s in physics engineering from the University of Aveiro.
She is now an Assistant Professor at University of Cape Verde, where she has been teaching since March 2016. Her current research interests are focused on the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence applied to water and agriculture.
Recently she won 3 scholarships: The African Research Initiative for Scientific Excellence fellowship (ARISE), Artificial Intelligence for Development of Africa (AI4D) and Fulbright Visiting Scholar to foster research at her university.
Mariana P. Candido, PhD
Mariana P. Candido, Winship Distinguished Research Professor of History, 2023-2026 and Professor (Ph.D. African History, York University, Canada, 2006; M.A. African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, Mexico, 2000; B.A. History, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1997). Slavery and Abolition; Transatlantic Slave Trade; African Diaspora; Atlantic History; Slavery and the Law; Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s History; Violence.
Mariana P. Candido is a specialist in the history of West Central Africa, including the Atlantic World and the African diaspora, in the era of the transatlantic slave trade (ca. 1550-1860). West Central Africa was the region most affected by this trade in terms of its duration and the number of people enslaved. Her work combines social and economic history, focusing on slavery, migration, colonialism, collective versus individual property rights, and gender.
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