Women’s Studies

The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
By Judith A. Byfield

In this finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making, Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.

Embodied Engineering
Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali
By Laura Ann Twagira

Common narratives about development in Africa miss the critical technological work of women. Twagira’s study instead positions Malian women as rural engineers whose strategic planning and labor over the course of the twentieth century assured their food security.

Embodied Engineering
Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali
By Laura Ann Twagira

Common narratives about development in Africa miss the critical technological work of women. Twagira’s study instead positions Malian women as rural engineers whose strategic planning and labor over the course of the twentieth century assured their food security.

The Great Upheaval
Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria
By Judith A. Byfield

In this finely textured social and intellectual history of gender and nation making, Byfield captures the dynamism of women’s political engagement in postwar Nigeria. She illuminates the centrality of gender to the study of nationalism, offering new lines of inquiry into the late colonial era and its consequences for the future Nigerian state.

Militarizing Marriage
West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire
By Sarah J. Zimmerman

By prioritizing women and conjugality in the historiography of African colonial soldiers, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule across French Empire.

Exiting the Fragility Trap
Rethinking Our Approach to the World’s Most Fragile States
By David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy

Carment and Samy investigate the dynamics of state transitions in fragile contexts, with a focus on states trapped in fragility. They consider fragility’s evolution in trapped countries; in those that move in and out of it; and in those that have exited it, thus taking a major step toward a new theory of the so-called fragility trap.

Women’s Perspectives on Human Security
Violence, Environment, and Sustainability
Edited by Richard Matthew, Patricia A. Weitsman, Gunhild Hoogensen Gjørv, Nora Davis, and Tera Dornfeld

This multidisciplinary collection examines women’s security threats stemming from conflict, environmental policy, and economic limitations, as well as the growing repertoire of grass-roots solutions women are creating, demanding, and sharing throughout the world to increase their security.

Militarizing Marriage
West African Soldiers’ Conjugal Traditions in Modern French Empire
By Sarah J. Zimmerman

By prioritizing women and conjugality in the historiography of African colonial soldiers, Militarizing Marriage historicizes how the subjugation of women was indispensable to military conquest and colonial rule across French Empire.

Female Monarchs and Merchant Queens in Africa
By Nwando Achebe

Drawing from distinctly African source materials and methods, Achebe’s groundbreaking historical account examines the shared power, influence, and authority that uniquely African, female-gendered entities—people, diviners, and deities—exert across Africa’s interconnected physical and spiritual worlds.

Radical Utu
Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai
By Besi Brillian Muhonja

In Radical Utu: Critical Ideas and Ideals of Wangari Muta Maathai, Wangari Maathai is presented as a scholar whose contributions to gender equality, democratic spaces, economic equity and global governance, and indigenous African languages and knowledges paralleled her renowned environmental activism.

Josie Mpama/Palmer
Get Up and Get Moving
By Robert R. Edgar

The latest in the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series, Josie Mpama/Palmer: Get Up and Get Moving tells the story of Josie Mpama/Palmer’s activism and political legacy in South Africa and around the world.

Wangari Maathai
By Tabitha Kanogo

This concise biography tells the story of Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner who devoted her life to campaigning for environmental conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty.

Exiting the Fragility Trap
Rethinking Our Approach to the World’s Most Fragile States
By David Carment and Yiagadeesen Samy

Carment and Samy investigate the dynamics of state transitions in fragile contexts, with a focus on states trapped in fragility. They consider fragility’s evolution in trapped countries; in those that move in and out of it; and in those that have exited it, thus taking a major step toward a new theory of the so-called fragility trap.

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction
By Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Kozaczka demonstrates how Polish American women writers have acknowledged their patriarchal oppression and tells the complex story of how they sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.

Hip-Hop in Africa
Prophets of the City and Dustyfoot Philosophers
By Msia Kibona Clark
· Foreword by Quentin Williams
· Afterword by Akosua Adomako Ampofo

Msia Kibona Clark examines some of Africa’s biggest hip-hop scenes and shows how hip-hop helps us understand specifically African realities. A tribute to a genre and its artists, Hip-Hop in Africa details the spread of hip-hop culture in Africa and pushes the study of music and diaspora in critical new directions.

Writing an Icon
Celebrity Culture and the Invention of Anaïs Nin
By Anita Jarczok

Before Madonna and her many imitators, there was Anaïs Nin, the diarist, novelist, and provocateur. Jarczok reveals how Nin crafted her personae, which she rewrote and restyled to suit her needs, and how she occupied a singular space in 20th-century culture, as a literary figure, a voice of female sexual liberation, and a celebrity.

Driven toward Madness
The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio
By Nikki M. Taylor

Margaret Garner was a runaway slave who, when confronted with capture, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Driven toward Madness probes slavery’s legacy of violence and trauma to capture her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance.

Women in the Shadows
Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali
By Jennifer Goodlander

Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, connects a mythic past to the present through public ritual performance and is one of most important performance traditions in Bali. The dalang, or puppeteer, is revered in Balinese society as a teacher and spiritual leader. Recently, women have begun to study and perform in this traditionally male role, an innovation that has triggered resistance and controversy.In

Making the Mark
Gender, Identity, and Genital Cutting
By Miroslava Prazak

Why do female genital cutting practices persist? How does circumcision affect the rights of girls in a culture where initiation forms the lynchpin of the ritual cycle at the core of defining gender, identity, and social and political status? In Making the Mark, Miroslava Prazak follows the practice of female circumcision through the lives and activities of community members in a rural Kenyan farming society as they decide whether or not to participate in the tradition.In

Marriage by Force?
Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa
Edited by Annie Bunting, Benjamin N. Lawrance, and Richard L. Roberts
· Foreword by Doris Buss
· Afterword by Emily S. Burrill

Despite international human rights decrees condemning it, marriage by force persists to this day. In this volume, the editors bring together legal scholars, anthropologists, historians, and development workers to explore the range of forced marriage practices in sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a masterful presentation of new perspectives on the practice.