Ousseina D. Alidou is Full Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the incoming Director of Rutgers Center for Women’s Global Leadership. She is Rutgers University Academic Director of the Mandela Washington Young Fellowship/YALI-Civic Leadership (2016-present);Professor Alidou is a theoretical linguist and cultural critic whose research focuses on women’s agency in African Muslim societies in the Sahel and East Africa (Kenya); gendered discourses of citizenship and rights; gender, education, politics and leadership. She is the author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, a runner-up Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women’s Caucus of the Association of African Studies) and Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Alidou co-edited Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean with Renée Larrier (Kentucky: (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) Lexington Book, 2015); Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa with Ahmed Sikainga ( (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006) and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Co-edited with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000);. In addition, she has published over 50 book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA); Comparative Literature; and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East; and Africa Today
Ousseina Alidou is the recipient of several national and international scholarly and service awards including: 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 (AAI)’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2010) and serves currently as AAI Board Member; Ford Foundation Human Rights and Social Justice Grant Award (2005); Rutgers University Board of Trustee’s Scholarly Excellence Award (2005); University of Hamburg, GERMANY, Visiting Professor Fellowship, Department of Linguistics and African Studies and Graduate Faculty of Intercultural Education (2003) ; and University of Lueneburg Graduate Faculty in Postcolonial Cultural Studies Visiting Scholars’ Writing Fellowship Award (2002).
Ousseina Alidou has been a member of the ASA since 1994. Her other previous appointments and services include: Chair of the All African Studies Programs (USA) (2009-2011). Professor Alidou directed the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University (2009-Spring2015); She taught in several American Universities including (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign; The Ohio State University; Ohio University; Cleveland State University) and was a visiting Professor at the University of Hamburg in Germany and the University of Lueneburg (Germany); a visiting Professor at Université Abdou Moumouni (Republic of Niger); She served as external doctoral thesis reviewer University of Winneba (Ghana); She serves as a Senior Faculty Advisor to UNESCO BREDA’s Gender and Transformative Leadership Curriculum Design for African Universities and Civil Society.