Notes on Contributors
Annachiara Raia Ph.D. (2018), is assistant professor in African literature at Leiden University (The Netherlands). Specialised in Swahili Muslim textual traditions and interested in the question of archive and collection, she is currently researching on vernacular print networks in the 20th-century Indian Ocean.
Clarissa Vierke Ph.D. (2010), is professor of Literatures in African Languages at Bayreuth University (Germany). She is an expert of Swahili poetry, manuscript cultures and has been working on travelling texts in East Africa and literary entanglements with the Indian Ocean.
Kai Kresse is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universitaet Berlin and Vice-Director of Research at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). He has conducted fieldwork on the Kenyan Swahili coast since 1998, working on and with local thinkers, and on internal debates of the Muslim community. His publications include the monographs ‘Philosophising in Mombasa’ (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and ‘Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience’ (Indiana University Press, 2018), the edited translation of Sheikh al-Amin Mazrui’s Uwongozi (Guidance) (Brill, 2017), and the edited volume ‘Struggling with History: Islam and Cosmopolitanism in the western Indian Ocean’ (Hurst/Columbia University Press 2007/2008).
Jasmin Mahazi holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies (BGSMCS, FU Berlin) on the textual corpus and social dimensions of vave oral poetry and its ritual performance. Currently she is an associate researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin working on a matrifocal anthropological study of oral archives and embodied knowledge practices along the Swahili coast.
Kadara Swaleh is Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, Germany from April 2021 in a transnational group project titled De:link:Re: link focusing on transnational infrastructure projects such as China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). He is concurrently pursuing a Ph.D. at Freie Universität Berlin in the Cultural and Social anthropology Institute, examining the impact and repercussions of China’s BRI projects in Mombasa, Kenya. He is published in peer-reviewed journals and contributed to book chapters on diverse topics like Islamic proselytizing, inter-faith relations, Swahili culture, Swahili poetry, and women’s rights in Islam.
Rayya Timammy Ph.D. is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Nairobi. For the last 17 years, she has been the chairperson in the Department of Kiswahili. Her areas of specialization are Kiswahili Language and Literature and Muslim Women issues. Prof. Timammy is also a Kiswahili fiction writer and composer of poems.
Figure 2
Ustadh Mahmoud Mau during a reading at Iwalewahaus, University of Bayreuth, 2015
