• PhD, Michigan State University, 2013
• BA, University of Nigeria, 2007

HST 143: Global Inequality and Power
HST 218: African States and Civilizations to 1800
HST 213: Modern Africa: Globalization and Imperialism Since 1800
GGS 350/HST 367: Women, Gender and Sexuality in Africa
HST 331: Christian and Muslim Communities in Africa
HST 418: Comparative Slavery: Africa, America and the Caribbean
HST 419: Readings in African History: Slavery, Imperialism, Gender/Sexuality, and Urbanization
HST 506: The North and South Atlantic Core Seminar

I am a West African Atlantic historian. I use a variety of oral, written and material culture sources to examine changing labor systems, mobilities, slavery and abolition, and cosmopolitanism; as well as constructions of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in West Africa between the 18^th and 20^th centuries.

I am currently working on a book entitled, “Rebellious Migrants: Forging Abolition, Cosmopolitan Identities, and Postcolonial Spaces in West Africa, 1840-1960.” The project explores how the dissident mobilities and informal economies of formerly enslaved African “recaptives” and African indentured labor traffickers were critical to the development of contradictory practices of abolitionism, new regimes of dependency and forced labor, contested meanings of freedom, and new diaspora borderland communities in Sierra Leone, Calabar, Fernando Po, and Gabon during the New Imperialism.

Book                          

Emergent Masculinities: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019).

• Winner, ASWAD “2020 Rosalyn Terborg-Penn Book Prize for Outstanding Original Scholarship on Gender and Sexuality in the African Diaspora.”
• Finalist, ASWAD “2020 First Book Prize.”
• Finalist, African Studies Association “2020 Best Book Prize.”

Peer Reviewed Research Encyclopedia                  

"African Masculinities," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Spring 2019)​

Articles in Refereed Journals    

"Performing Ogaranya: Kalu Ezelu Uwaoma, Male Slavery and Freedom Politics in Southeastern Nigeria, c.1860-1940," Journal of West African History, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2017): 27-60.

"Female Masculinities, Dissident Sexuality and the Material Politics of Gender in Early Twentieth-Century Igboland," The Journal of Women’s History Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter 2017): 35-60

"Judith Van Allen, ‘Sitting on a Man, and the Foundation of Igbo Women’s Studies," Journal of West African History Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 2017): 156-165.

Book Chapter           

“Gender and Sexuality in Nigeria,” in The Routledge Handbook of Nigerian History, ed. Saheed Aderinto (NY: Routledge, Forthcoming).

"Matriliny, Masculinity, and Contested Gendered Definitions of Ethnic Identity and Power in Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Nigeria," in Gendering Ethnicity in African Women’s Lives, ed. J. B. Shetler (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015), 233-264.

Book Review            

Review of Florence Bernault, Colonial Transactions: Imaginaries, Bodies, and Histories in Gabon (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), Journal of African History [Forthcoming].

Review of Political Organization in Nigeria Since the Late Stone Age: A History of the Igbo People, by John. N. Oriji, Journal of West African History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Summer 2018): 129-131.

Audiovisual              

Film Documentary: “Historical Ethnography with the Ohafia-Igbo: Gendered Power and Social Change in the Biafran Atlantic Age.” (June 2015).

• 2019-2020: American Council of Learned Societies Centennial Fellowship in the Dynamics of Place
• 2019: SUNY OVPRED/HI Research Fellowship, SUNY-Buffalo
  
• 2017-2018: History Department Faculty Research Grant, SUNY-Buffalo
• 2016: ​Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship
• 2015: The Wenner-Gren Foundation Engaged Anthropology Grant  
  
• 2014: Civic Engagement Research Dissemination Fellowship
• 2011:​ The Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
• 2008-2013:  Harold G. Marcus Distinguished Fellowship in African History

• Book Review Editor, Journal of West African History (JWAH​)​
• African Studies Association
• American Historical Association
• New York African Studies Association