Research

At its core, my research agenda centres black African women to explore questions of gender, subjectivity, power and inequality in the contemporary global context. My monograph, Fashioning Postfeminism: Spectacular Femininity and Transnational Culture in Nigeria, is presently under review at the University of Illinois Press. The book argues that young, class-privileged Nigerian women who dress in what I call spectacularly feminine style - long weaves, false eyelashes and nails and so on - see themselves as 'postfeminist' subjects, and makes a case for the empirical possibility and analytic value of thinking in terms of 'postfeminism' in a context like Nigeria. Hear a little more about this research here.

Forthcoming in 2019 is a book collection on luxury consumption in Africa, co-edited with Mehita Iqani of the University of the Witwatersrand, who visited Sussex in 2017 as one of the inagural Asa Briggs fellows. 

Other recently completed projects include a guest edited issue of the journal Feminist Africa on the theme of fashion and beauty politics in Africa.

I would welcome applications for doctoral research on the following broad themes:

• feminism(s) and gender politics in Africa
• black, African and/or transnational popular and consumer cultures
• fashion and beauty politics
• postfeminism
• feminist theory