I am a historian of Mali and the West African Sahel from the 18th through the 20th century.
I am the Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. I am currently completing Navel of the World, a book that offers a new history of slavery, revolution and empire in the modern world, told from the vantage point of African Muslims. Set in the Sahel, where the worlds of the Atlantic ocean and Sahara desert meet, the book charts a micro-history of social and economic change in the region from the 1790s through 1960, through the lens of intimate and family relationships.
Since 2018, I am also a member of the Projet Archives des Femmes, a collective preserving and promoting the archives of Malian women’s anti-colonial and gender-based struggles.
In parallel, I serve as book reviews editor for the Journal of West African History, advisory editorial board member of the Journal of African History, contributing editor of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and international correspondant for Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales.
I received my PhD in African History from UCLA in 2022. In 2024, I was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and from 2022 to 2025, I was the James Weldon Johnson Assistant Professor of History at New York University.
CMS Photographie Bamako
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