Events Gallery
The Arts of Africa: A Living Archive - Natasha Becker (Centering Africa Annual Lecture 2025)
In this talk, Natasha Becker, inaugural Curator of African Art at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, shares her curatorial approach to reimagining African art through a transhistorical lens. Drawing on recent exhibitions such as Lhola Amira: Facing the Future and Leilah Babirye: We Have a History, as well as ongoing research projects, Becker explores what a history of African art might look like if shaped by heritage, care, and relationality rather than institutional taxonomies.
Microhistory and Researching the African Past: The Heretic of Cacheu and Historical Methods - Dr. Toby Green
In his talk, “Microhistory and Researching the African Past: The Heretic of Cacheu and Historical Methods,” Dr. Green explores how microhistorical approaches can illuminate overlooked dimensions of Africa’s past. Drawing on his research into the history of Cacheu and the wider Atlantic world, he reflects on the possibilities and challenges of using microhistory to rethink historical methods and deepen our understanding of African historical experiences.
“Risk Imaginaries in Morocco's Pursuit of Development”- Salah Hamdoun
Societies today face accelerating change that strains the social and cultural foundations meant to hold them together. As people struggle to regain their footing amid forces moving faster than communities can adapt, new forms of resistance emerge. This webinar explores how musical expression, particularly the legacy of Casablanca’s Nass El Ghiwane, illuminates the power of art to reclaim collective direction, confront social loss, and challenge systems that prioritize endless economic growth over lived experience and shared meaning.
Between Culture and Code: A study of Organizational & Intercultural Comms, Gender & Digital Labor
This talk shares findings from Bolu Owoeye's research on how Nigerian women remote workers navigate intercultural communication in global digital workplaces. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the study reveals how culture, gender, language, and technology shape daily interactions between Nigerian workers and colleagues from the US, UK, Canada, and other countries.
AI-assisted Archives of West African History
What happens when AI meets West African archives?
In this webinar, Professor Trevor Getz presents History Genie, a Stanford-built research tool, and leads a frank discussion about ethics, data sovereignty, classroom use, and governance.
Gender is the Stuff of Coups
Dr. Miles Tendi, a professor of politics at the University of Oxford, leads the discussion on how gender and women’s studies should be at the forefront when scholars analyze, reflect on, and write about coups in the discipline of politics, since coups are inherently gendered events in terms of their motivations, justifications, enactments, and aftermaths.
Centering Africa Annual Lecture 2024 - Tsitsi Dangarembga
On November 11, 2024, the Center for African Studies hosted the Centering Africa Annual Lecture at Levinthal Hall, featuring acclaimed Zimbabwean writer, filmmaker, and activist Tsitsi Dangarembga. In her talk, Dangarembga explored her decades-long efforts to empower Zimbabwean women through literature and film, offering insights into identity, gender, and social change. The lecture highlighted her groundbreaking Tambudzai Trilogy—Nervous Conditions, The Book of Not, and This Mournable Body (Booker Prize 2020 finalist)—and her creative and activist work’s theoretical foundations.
Centering Africa Annual Lecture 2022 - Timnit Gebru
Gebru discusses why she founded The Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (DAIR) and what she hopes this interdisciplinary, community-based, global network of AI researchers can accomplish.