Participant Info
- First Name
- Madina
- Last Name
- Thiam
- Country
- United States
- State
- CA California
- madina.thiam@nyu.edu
- Affiliation
- New York University
- Website URL
- https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/madina-thaim---profile-page.html
- Keywords
- Sahel, Islam, Race, Gender, African Women, Migrations, French Colonialism, Slavery, Freedom
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
I am an assistant Professor of African History at New York University, having obtained my PhD in 2022 from the University of California, Los Angeles.
My first book project is entitled Seeking Freedom in the Sahel: Frontiers of Liberation and Geographies of Belonging in an Atlantic-Saharan Crossroads. It explores shifts in power, slavery and colonialism in present-day central Mali from the early-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, from the perspective of ordinary Sahelian Muslims. Blending global history and microhistory, the project traces how scholars, traders, pilgrims, clerics, and enslaved women and men from the region, rejected slaving and imperial regimes by enacting their own practices of freedom and geographies of belonging.
My research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, American Historical Association, and African Studies Association, among others.
In addition, I am a member of the Projet Archives des Femmes, a Bamako-based digitization project. We are collecting, safeguarding, and creating a public archive of papers of Malian women involved in the 1950s movement for independence, and post-colonial feminist activism. I am also part of a working-group on contemporary migrations in southern Africa, headed by Tendayi Achiume.
- Recent Publications
Peer-reviewed
- “Women in Mali.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press, 2016–. Article published October 27, 2020.
- “History of Mali: Connectivity and State Formation since the 18th Century” (with Gregory Mann.) In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Oxford University Press, 2016–. Article published October 27, 2020.
Book Chapters and Other Academic Writings
- “Struggle, Neglect and Archives,” Council for the Development of the Social Sciences in Africa (CODESRIA) Bulletin no. 5&6 Special Issue / The Crisis in Mali and in the Sahel Region (2020), 21-23.
- “Nicholas Said, étonnant voyageur.” In Sahara, mondes connectés, edited by Sophie Caratini, Charles Grémont, Céline Lesourd et Olivier Schinz, 75-9. Paris: Gallimard, 2019.
Media Articles
- “From the Niger to the Nile,” Africa Is a Country
- “Le Mali ne doit pas devenir…” (with the Benbere collective), Le Monde
- “De Tombouctou à la Jamaïque : les voyages d’Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq,” Libération
Documentaries
- Media Coverage
- Africa Is a Country, Le Monde, Libération, History Hit, NationWide FM
- Social Media
- @thiamm
- Country Focus
- Mali, Sahel
- Expertise by Geography
- Africa, Caribbean, France, Mediterranean
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century, 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Colonialism, Emancipation, Gender, Local & Regional, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Slavery, Women
