Selina Makana
Assistant Professor of African History, University of Memphis
Selina Makana is an Assistant Professor of African history at the University of Memphis. Her research and teaching focus on African women’s social history, gender and militarism, transnational feminisms, and African diaspora studies. Her current monograph uses oral interviews with former women combatants and archival records to probe the relationship between gender and militarism in contemporary Angola. This research explores how nationalist projects and armed insurgent organizations utilize gender—in particular ideas of masculinities and femininities —to consolidate power and perpetuate violence. In 2017-2020, she was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality and a lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She holds a Ph.D. in African Diaspora Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from the University of California-Berkeley. Makana has been a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford University. Her recent publications have appeared in Meridians: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism, Gender & History, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women’s History. Selina Makana is a member of the African Feminist Initiative and serves on the editorial advisory board of Feminist Africa.
Working Group Affiliation