Akosua Adomako Ampofo

is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. She was the foundation Director of the University’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (2005–2009) and from 2010–2015 she was Director of the Institute of African Studies, both at the University of Ghana. Akosua Adomako Ampofo is the founding Vice-President, and immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her current research areas include African Knowledge Systems; Higher education; Race and Identity Politics; Masculinities; and Popular Culture. She co-produced the film, When Women Speak with Kate Skinner (and directed by Aseye Tamakloe, 2022). In 2023–2024 she was the Wanari Maathai Guest Professor in the Global Partnership Netwok (GPN) at the University of Kassel.

Edwin Asa Adjei

is a Research Fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. He holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Ghana. His research focuses on interrogating African literature, particularly African children and young adult literature (oral and written). Of particular interest to him is the manner in which literature and literary performances may both embody and act upon social constructions among cultures globally and especially in Africa.

Eric A. Anchimbe

is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests are in postcolonial linguistics, pragmatics (with focus on postcolonial pragmatics), sociolinguistics, World Englishes and political discourse. Among his publications are the monographs, Offers and Offer Refusals: A Postcolonial Pragmatics Perspective on World Englishes (Benjamins, 2018) and Language Policy and Identity Construction (Benjamins, 2013). He is the editor of Structural and Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Indigenisation (Springer, 2015), Language Contact in a Postcolonial Setting (De Gruyter Mouton, 2012) and Postcolonial Linguistic Voices (De Gruyter Mouton, 2011, with Stephen A. Mforteh).

Susan Arndt

is Professor of English and Anglophone Literatures at Bayreuth University. She has worked and taught at Humboldt University, Berlin; St. Antony’s College, Oxford; University of Frankfurt/Main and the Centre for Literary and Cultural Research, Berlin. She is the Spokesperson of the Doctoral College for Intersectionality Studies at the University of Bayreuth. Trained as a scholar of English, German and African literatures, her theoretical framework comprises Transcultural Literary Studies, Gender Studies, Postcolonial and Diaspora Studies. She has published on whiteness, racism and British writing; gender and feminism in Nigerian literature; intertextuality and futurity.

Muyiwa Falaiye

Ph.D. is a Professor of African Philosophy & African Studies and Director, Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos. He is also Principal Investigator (Knowledges) at the African Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests include Socio-political philosophy, African Philosophy, and Afro-American Philosophy. Falaiye is the author of “Philosophic Sagacity and the Problems of Transmitting Philosophic Knowledge without Writing: The Ekiti Yoruba Experience” (2006), A Philosopher Interrogates African Polis: How can we Get it Right? (2012), and co-author of Epistemological Issues in Indigenous Knowledge Production and Transmission: The Sagacity Experience (2021), among others.

Katharina Greven

is a scholar and researcher at the University of Bayreuth and works as a curator and project manager at the Iwalewahaus within the Cluster Excellence ‘Africa Multiple’. She studied at the Art Academy Düsseldorf with Thomas Ruff, wrote her MA Thesis in African Language Studies and her PhD on the archive as a place of belonging. Her research interests are archives, communal knowledge production and affective reading of images.

Christine Hanke

is professor for Digital and Audiovisual Media and PI in the “Africa Multiple” Cluster of Excellence at Bayreuth University, where she conducts a project on the legacies of ‘Colonial Commodities.’ She teaches and researches at the intersections of Media Theory, Postcolonial Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.

She is the author of Practices of Speculation: Modeling, Embodiment, Figuration, co-edited with Jeanne Cortiel, Jan Simon Hutta, and Colin Milburn (2022) https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839447512 and Zwischen Auflösung und Fixierung. Zur Konstitution von ‘Rasse’ und ‘Geschlecht’ in der Physischen Anthropologie um 1900 [Between Dissolution and Fixation. On the Constitution of ‘Race’ and ‘Sex’ in Physical Anthropology around 1900] (2007).

Amanda Hlengwa

is a senior lecturer in the Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning (CHERTL) at Rhodes University. She sees her work as an academic developer and contribution to higher education studies emerging primarily from two areas. Curriculum development concerns mainly focus on the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and teaching and learning. The second contribution is her role as Rhodes University’s coordinator of the New Generation of Academics Programme (nGAP) and Nurturing Emerging Scholars Programme. Amanda’s interests are underpinned by her commitment to the transformation agenda of higher education.

Catherine Kiprop

is a Professor of Educational Management and Leadership. She holds a PhD in Educational Management from the Nelson Mandela University, South Africa; A Master of Education in the same field from Egerton University, Kenya and B.ED (Arts) degree from Moi University, Kenya. Catherine began her career as a high school teacher before joining Moi university as a lecturer in the department of Educational Management and Policy Studies in the School of Education. She served as the Director of the Institute of Gender, Diversity and Peace Studies. Catherine has published widely in peer reviewed journals and her areas of interests in research include: Strategic management, School discipline, educational leadership and gender studies. She is a member of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence Board and the Gender and Diversity Officer of the Moi University African Cluster Centre.

Elísio Macamo

is a Professor of Sociology and African Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. His research has focused lately on the relevance of research and the knowledge produced in Africa to the social sciences in general and to an understanding of scholarship as a collaborative enterprise across borders. He continues to have a strong interest in the sociology of risk and disasters, the subject of his habilitation thesis at the University of Bayreuth published by CODESRIA in 2017 with the title “The Taming of Fate”. Between 2011 and 2019 he served as the Director of the Centre for African Studies of the University of Basel and between 2015 and 2019 he served two terms as Head of the Department of Social Sciences at the same University.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, Professor Extraordinarious at the University of South Africa, and Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. A former President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, he co-chairs the Frantz Fanon Foundation, and is a senior associate of the Soweto-based Black-House Kollective. His work focuses on the philosophical dimensions of coloniality, race, and decoloniality, and he has published extensively in phenomenology, the theory of religion, the philosophy of race, and the theoretical foundations of ethnic studies.

Cassandra Mark-Thiesen

is leader of the junior research group “African Knowledges and the History Publication” at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth. Previously, she was a lecturer in Global & African History at the University of Basel. She is a 2016–2018 Marie Heim-Vögtlin Fellowship recipient (Swiss National Science Foundation). She is co-editor of the volume The Politics of Historical Memory and Commemoration in Africa (2021), and author of Mediators, Contract Men and Colonial Capital: Mechanized Gold Mining in the Gold Coast Colony, 1879–1909 (2018). Her general research interests include the historical cultures of Africa, as well as the history of labour, education and learning, inequality, and globalization.

Lena Naumann

is a curator and junior fellow within in the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). Her PhD project focuses on the Oeuvre of the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger and the New Sacred Art Movement within the canon of modern Nigerian Art.

Naumann was coordinating the digitization process of the Ulli Beier Photographic Estate at Iwalewahaus and the cooperation with the Center for Black Culture and International Understanding in Osogbo until 2022. She is currently working as a cultural educator in Nuremberg.

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni

PhD (2004), is Professor and Chair in Epistemologies of the Global South with Emphasis on Africa and Vice-Dean of Research in the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. He has published extensively on decolonization and decoloniality and various aspects of African Studies. His latest publication is Beyond the Coloniality of Internationalism: Reworlding the World from the Global South (CODESRIA, 2024).

Thando Njovane

is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literary Studies in English at Rhodes University, where she is an Andrew Mellon early career scholar. Her research interests include childhood, trauma, memory, modernisms, postcolonialisms, feminisms, & higher education. She is the Early Career Officer at the Rhodes African Studies Centre and the co-director of Finding Africa, a postcolonial African studies platform convened in collaboration with the University of Leeds and Bristol in the UK.

Samuel Ntewusu

is an Associate Professor of History at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. He is currently the Director of the Institute. He previously served as the Research Coordinator of the History and Politics Section of the Institute. His core areas of research are urban history and transport, mining, chieftaincy archiving, slavery and the slave trade, religious cults and environmental protection, German colonialism, drugs and drug use, Ghana-China relations, Zongos (Migrant communities) and (in)formalization in West Africa. He has collaborated in research and teaching with several scholars, practitioners, and institutions in Ghana and abroad. He was the recipient of the 2016 Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Fellowship.

Anthony Okeregbe

PhD, is an Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and an affiliate of the Institute of African and Diaspora Studies, University of Lagos, Nigeria. He is also Principal Investigator (Research Section Learning) at the African Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth, Germany. His teaching and research interests include Phenomenology/Existential Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Contemporary African Philosophy, and existential studies of African lifeworlds. He is the co-editor of A Study in African Socio-Political Philosophy (2012) and De-globalizing African ‘Truths’: Some Insights from Frantz Fanon et al. (2018).

Zandi Radebe

is an emerging activist-scholar in the Department of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her research interests span various topics, including Azanian liberation philosophy, memory and resistance, decolonial thought, and Afrikana womanism. Alongside her scholarly pursuits, she serves as the co-founder and director of the BlackHouse Kollective, a Black Consciousness Pan-Afrikanist movement based in Soweto. Currently, she is engaged in her doctoral studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), deftly balancing academic scholarship, activism, and the joys and challenges of motherhood, caring for three children, including AmaWele.

Elelwani Ramugondo

is Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She was previously Deputy Dean for Postgraduate Education and Chair of UCT’s Academic Freedom Committee. A founding member of UCT’s Black Academic Caucus, she was appointed Special Advisor on Transformation to the Vice Chancellor during the call to decolonize the University by the student-led Rhodes Must Fall movement. She currently co-convenes the UCT Decolonial Summer School. In 2023, she was awarded the Ruth Zemke Lectureship in Occupational Science. She holds an Honorary Professorship at Stirling University and has been named one of 12 Remarkable African Life Scientists.

Eleanor Schaumann

is a PhD candidate in the project “Karakul Circulations: Colonial Economies and the Un_Making of Disciplinary Knowledges in Germany and Namibia” at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth. She is a Junior Fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS). Eleanor is writing her PhD thesis on the multiple enactments of value within the Karakul sheep industry in Namibia, and its entanglements with the legacies of apartheid and German colonialism. Her wider research interests include animal breeding science, settler colonialism, and extinction studies.

Katharina Schramm

PhD (2004), holds the Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. She is facilitating the research group “Anthropology of Global Inequalities” which is invested in a critical public anthropology at the interface of Science & Technology Studies (STS) and political anthropology.