Past Directors | The Harriet Tubman Institute

Paul E. Lovejoy

rebsl — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 19:53:44 +0000

As Distinguished Research Professor the Department of History, 91��ɫ, he was Founding Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at 91��ɫ and held the Canada Research Chair in African Diaspora History (2000-2015). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was a member of Council of the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada, serving as Vice President and Acting President. He was a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO “Slave Route” Project from 1996 to 2012, publishing several books in association with the Project. He was co-editor of the journal, African Economic History, for 37 years and continues as General Editor of The Harriet Tubman Series on the African Diaspora (Africa World Press), having published 40 books in the Series. In 2019, the Journal of Global Slavery and Brill Publishers established the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize, an Annual Award for Excellence and Originality in a Major Work on Global Slavery. In 2021, African Economic History published a special issue in his honor (Vol, 49, No. 1), and in 2024, Toyin Falola published Transformations in History: African Societies and Economies in The Works of Paul Lovejoy (Berlin and Leiden: De Gruyter Brill). He also received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Extraordinary Global Academic Leadership from Obafemi Awolowo University *the Distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association in 2024. Lovejoy has published more than forty books, including Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (1775-1850) (2016), Slavery in the Global Diaspora of Africa (2019), Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: An Enslaved Muslim of the Black Atlantic (2025), and Ecología, etnografía y comercio musulmán a través del Sahel: interacciones entre el Sahara, la sabana y el bosque en África Occidental (2025). He has co-edited Slavery, Resistance and Abolitions: A Pluralist Perspective (2019), The Atlantic and Africa: The Second Slavery and Beyond (2021), Regenerated Identities: Documenting African Lives (2022), and Boko Haram, Islamic Protest and National Security (2023). His various web-based projects include Equiano’s World: Gustavus Vassa and the Abolition of the Slave Trade (), which is the subject of his current research. His forthcoming book, Olaudah of Ikwuano: The True Origins of an African Abolitionist is being published by Princeton University Press.

Research keywords: African Economic History, Islamic Africa, slavery, biography, African diaspora

José C. Curto

rebsl — Wed, 13 Sep 2023 15:43:34 +0000

Bianca Beauchemin

rebsl — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 17:23:32 +0000

Bianca Beauchemin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at 91��ɫ. She recently was the 2022-2023 recipient of the postdoctoral fellowship in Black Feminist Thought at Queen’s University. She was also awarded the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship while completing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in Gender Studies.

She has published a book review of Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women in Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography and is currently working on the final draft of her article entitled "Opaque Aesthetics of Freedom: Romaine la Prophètesse, the Haitian Revolution, and Black Diasporic Possibilities” for the Journal of Canadian Studies’ special issue on Black Studies in Canada. She is also working on her book manuscript Arousing Freedoms: Re-Imagining the Haitian Revolution through Sensuous Marronage, where she re-narrates the Haitian Revolution through Black feminist and Black queer epistemologies and methodologies. Disrupting the authority of the colonial archive and of prevalent masculinist framings of insurgency discourses, she explores the ways in which embodiment, labour, sensuousness, spirituality, marronage, resistance and alternative sexualities and genders, re-imagine the edicts of freedom and Black liberation.

Annie Bunting

rebsl — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 21:53:19 +0000

Dr. Bunting is Professor of Law & Society and 91��ɫ Research Chair (YRC) in International Gender Justice & Peacebuilding (2024-29). Her research expertise includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods; feminist international law; contemporary slavery; and SGBV in war. From 2010-2022, she directed an international research collaboration, Conjugal Slavery in War: Partnership for the study of enslavement, marriage and masculinities, with community-based researchers and women’s rights scholars in the DRC, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Uganda, Canada and England.

She is the co-editor of Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (Ohio Univ. Press, 2016) with Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts; Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (Univ. of British Columbia Press, 2017; Cornell Univ. Press, 2018) with Joel Quirk; and Research as more than extraction: Knowledge production and sexual violence in post conflict African societies (Ohio Univ. Press, 2023) with Allen Kiconco and Joel Quirk. She has a forthcoming volume, Just Methods: Communities of practice in law and society research (Hart, 2026).

Keywords: socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods, feminist international law, contemporary slavery, sexual and gender-based violence in war

Nathanael Ojong

rebsl — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 07:15:07 +0000

Dr. Ojong is Assistant Professor of International Development Studies. He is Associate Editor of the journal Sustainable Development, Associate Editor of Energy Exploration & Exploitation, and is a member of the Knowledge Network of African Experts established by the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on Africa to help shape economic and social policy in Africa.

His work encompasses renewable energy technologies and electricity capitalism, energy and sustainability, urban and rural livelihoods, financial inclusion, entrepreneurship, informal economies, social determinants of health, and social protection in sub-Saharan Africa.

His work has appeared in journals such as Nature Energy, Energy Research & Social Science, Environmental Research Letters, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Rural Studies, and Journal of Business Research.

Gertrude Mianda

rebsl — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 05:14:28 +0000

Gertude Mianda is the former Director of the Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on Africa and its Diasporas at 91��ɫ. She is a Professor in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at Glendon College and was the Chair of the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at 91��ɫ (2011–15). Her research focuses on gender and post-colonialism in Africa—particularly on Congolese women—gender development and globalization as well as on immigration. Her immigration research focuses primarily on francophone Africans in the minority francophone community in Canada, particularly their economic and social integration.

Denielle A. Elliott

rebsl — Wed, 24 Nov 2021 17:20:00 +0000

Denielle A. Elliott is Associate Professor at 91��ɫ in the Departments of Anthropology and Social Science. She is currently the Graduate Program Director for the Science and Technology Studies program. She is a founding member of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography. Her research for the large part focuses on arts-based ethnography and the intersections of colonialism, medicine and science, and politics. She has conducted fieldwork in British Columbia (Vancouver's Downtown Eastside on HIV/AIDS, epidemiological surveillance and colonial health) and in Nairobi and Kisumu, Kenya (‘Safari Science’, experimental medicine, scientific infrastructure, and the politics of transnational science).

Her current project entitled "Neurological Imaginaries" explores the sensorial and affective dimensions of traumatic brain injuries.

Her recent book publication, (Routledge 2019), is a collaborative account of immunologist Davy Koech's life's work building bioscientific infrastructure in Kenya and his relationship with former president Daniel arap Moi.

She is co-editor with Anna Harris of the with Somatosphere.

Damilola Adebayo

rebsl — Sat, 13 Nov 2021 15:15:03 +0000

Damilola Adebayo is an Associate Professor of History and a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS). He serves as Vice President of the Canadian Association of African Studies and Associate Editor of History and Technology. An award-winning historian of Anglophone West Africa, particularly Nigeria, his research and teaching lie at the intersection of the history of technology, socioeconomic life, and the role of international organizations in Africa. His work examines the socioeconomic life of Western technologies in African cities since the mid-nineteenth century, with particular attention to the varied contexts in which energy, communication, and transportation technologies were introduced, adopted, appropriated, hybridised, reinvented, or discarded by both elite and everyday users, and to how these technologies have been both a cause and an effect of economic, social, and political change in African societies. His work has earned international recognition, including the Maurice Daumas Prize, awarded by the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC) for the best article in the history of technology, and the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) for the best article on the history of electrotechnology. His prize-winning scholarship has appeared in leading historical journals, including Past & Present. He earned a BA in History from the University of Ibadan, an MA in International History from the Geneva Graduate Institute, and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Cambridge-Africa Scholar and recipient of the IEEE Life Members' Fellowship in the History of Electrical and Computing Technology. His book project, Power and the People: Electricity and Urban Life in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Nigeria, contributes to broader debates on infrastructure, urbanization, development, state power, modernity, and energy inequality.

Keywords: African history, Nigerian history, history of technology, energy history, infrastructure, transportation, communication technologies, socioeconomic history, urban history, environmental history, international organisations, development, colonialism and postcolonialism, transnational history, public history, oral history, historical GIS, digital humanities