Ousseina D. Alidou is Professor of Theoretical Linguistics, Gender and Cultural Studies in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She directed the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University from 2009 to 2015. She is the author of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Changeand Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger, which was a runner-up for the Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women's Caucus of the Association of African Studies. She has co-edited numerous books including Writing through the Visual and Virtual in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africawith Ahmed and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. In addition, she has published book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA), Comparative Literature, Africa Today, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Africa Today. Alidou is the recipient of several national and international scholarly and service awards including: African Studies Association Service Award (2016), Obafemi Awolowo Center for Gender and Social Policy Studies Distinguished Visiting Scholar Service Award (2015), Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Award (2015), Newark Women-in-the Media Distinguished Community Service Award (2015), Rutgers University 2011 Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching, Africa America Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2010), Ford Foundation Human Rights and Social Justice Grant Award (2005), Rutgers University Board of Trustee’s Scholarly Excellence Award (2005) and she currently serves as a Senior Advisor to UNESCO BREDA on Higher Education Curriculum on Gender and Transformative Leadership for African Universities and Civil Societies.

Bio: Renée Larrier is Professor of French at Rutgers University New Brunswick, where she recently served as Chair of the Department. Author of Autofiction and Advocacy in the Francophone Caribbean (2006) and Francophone Women Writers of Africa and the Caribbean (2000), she also co-edited with Ousseina D. Alidou Writing Through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean (2015), and Migrating Words and Worlds: Pan-Africanism Updated(1999) with E. Anthony Hurley and Joseph McLaren. She has also contributed dozens of articles to essay collections and scholarly journals. She shares the editing duties of CARAF Books, the translation series at the University Press of Virginia, with Mildred Mortimer.