The African Studies Program is proud to welcome our newest faculty affiliate Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué. Mougoué joins the faculty of the African Cultural Studies department at UW-Madison from the history department of Baylor University.
Dr. Mougoué is an interdisciplinary feminist historian of Africa interested in how constructions of gender inform the comportment and performances of the body, religious beliefs, and political ideologies. Mougoué has visited campus on multiple occasions as a scholar, visiting our Africa library collections and presenting her research at Africa at Noon in 2017. She returned to Africa at Noon this February to speak about the ties between women’s clothing choices and Cameroonian nationalism.
Mougoué received her M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Purdue University, as well as a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her articles have appeared in a wide variety of academic journals including Gender & History, the Journal of West African History, and Feminist Africa, and her first book, Gender, Separatist Politics, and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press in 2019. Mougoué will be working on her second book project as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Moore Institute in NUI Galway in the Republic of Ireland this summer.
In her free time, Mougoué gives talks at women’s prisons on issues pertaining to self-esteem, identity, and overcoming abuse. She also enjoys long-distance running, traveling, photography, painting, and writing poetry and short stories.