Welcome! I am an African historian by training and am currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. I am completing my manuscript on the history of Cameroon, illuminating the roles of religion and gender in the construction of Cameroonian law during the transition to self-governance. My research focuses on gender, human rights,and legal history in West and Equatorial Africa.

I received my doctoral degree in December 2009 from the Department of History at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where I focused on the political and legal history of West Africa. During the 2009-2010 academic year I was a Lecturer at Harvard University in the History and African & African American Studies Departments.

My first book manuscript, which builds on my dissertation is entitled Traditional Marriage for the Modern Nation: Family Formation and the Politics of Religion in Colonial and Post-Colonial Cameroon. This study is a history of family law, gender rights, and religious and political transformation in Africa. 

During the academic year 2011-2012, I will be a faculty participant in the University of Chicago’s Center for Gender Studies Sawyer Seminar. As part of this seminar, I am leading the symposium on women and sexual rights: “Sexual Rights as Human Rights: Reproduction, Ritual, and the Reconstitution of Sexuality in the Human Rights Agenda.”

In 2011, I organized the Human Rights Program’s first conference on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), “A New Business Framework for Human Rights.” In March 2012, the conference participants will meet again to collaborate on the publication of a volume on the challenges, dilemmas, and possibilities of corporate-led development and economic agency within global humanitarianism.