Professor Ousseina Alidou appointed Summer 2025 Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South

The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South, at the John W. Kluge Center of the US Library of Congress, focuses on the history and cultures of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and Oceania. Professor Alidou will be using the immense foreign language collections in the specialized reading rooms of the Library of Congress to pursue her research on "Life and Being Human in West Sahel African Women's Cultural and Literary Narratives."

Professor Ousseina Alidou's new book published on International Women's Day

Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders (University of Michigan Press) examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences.

Professor Meheli Sen selected as 2024-2025 IRW Seminar Fellow

The Institute for Research on Women is dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, activism, and community at Rutgers. Programming includes a weekly seminar for faculty and graduate students, the IRW Distinguished Lecture Series, and an undergraduate learning community—all tied to an annual theme. In 2024-2025 the IRW Seminar theme is “Knowing Otherwise: Haunting, Conjuring, and Spectral Encounters.”

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