Africa Talks is a monthly talk series purposefully launched by the African Studies Program at UW-Madison in collaboration with the African Center for Community Development, Inc to coincide with the 50th Anniversary of Africa at Noon. This year, we want to celebrate 50 years of sharing scholarships on campus by reminding our community that the work we do must extend beyond the walls of the university. Every last Wednesday from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., advanced graduate student affiliates of the African Studies Program will present a one-hour talk to community members in Madison and its environs.
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Find a Past Lineup
Schedule for Fall 2025
September 24th
Location: Goodman South Library, 2222 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713
Talk Title: Environmental Histories and the Cold War in the Indian Ocean
Yadhav Deerpaul
Department of History, UW-Madison
Talk Description
The talk will focus on the small islands on the east coast of Africa – particularly those where human settlements began after European colonizers brought enslaved labor from Africa and Asia during the course of the seventeenth century. How can the history of these small islands be written together with that of continental Africa and what can such an approach contribute to African History/Studies?
Speaker’s Bio
Yadhav is a PhD student in the African History and History of Science, Medicine and Technology programs at UW–Madison. Their doctoral dissertation is on the colonial and postcolonial history of small islands on the east coast of Africa.
October 29th
Location: Goodman South Library, 2222 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713
Talk Title: Beyond Isolation: Centering West African Arabophone Literature in African & Global Contexts
Jibril Gabid
Department of African Cultural Studies
Talk Description
The twenty-first century is witnessing a naḥḍah (renaissance) of Arabic scholarship, emerging in the wake of the intellectual crisis produced by colonialism and its policies on Islamic and Arabic education. What distinguishes this period is an epistemic shift that has given rise to new textual genres and a new audience “equipped with new sensibilities, expectations, and worldly interests.” Yet, despite these significant developments, West African Arabic literature continues to be either neglected or studied in relative isolation, largely due to the persistent exclusion of Arabic from the broader critical discourse on sub-Saharan Africa. Such exclusion, I argue, amounts to the erasure of an entire literary tradition and its aesthetic values. This presentation seeks to reposition West African Arabophone literature within both the African literary studies and the wider field of global modern Arabic literature.
Speaker’s Bio
Jibril Gabid is a doctoral candidate and Arabic instructor in the Department of African Cultural Studies. His research seeks to explore ways of (re)imagining Islamic West Africa, foregrounding West Africa Muslim scholarship by shifting the gaze of Islamic knowledge production from an Arabo-centric one to one that privileges and affirms the contributions of Black West African Muslim intellectuals. Jibril received a bachelor’s degree in Arabic and Psychology from the University of Ghana and a master’s degree in Arabic Language and Literature from the American University in Cairo.
December 3rd
Location: Goodman South Library, 2222 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713
Talk Title: Cross-reading Afro-Asia and the Psychiatric Asylum in Vietnam and Algeria, 1945-1962
Nguyễn T. Thuỳ-Trang
Department of Geography, UW-Madison
Speaker’s Bio
Nguyễn’s dissertation project examines radical psychiatric/psychotherapeutic praxis in Vietnam and Algeria post-WWII, within a broader theoretical framing of Afro-Asia intimacies, postcolonial studies, decoloniality, and critical social theory from the Global South. Against the landscape of liberation wars and decolonization across the two continents, her research brings forth a radical reconfiguration of the psychiatric asylum space by studying the encounter between the seemingly distinct identities of psychiatric patient and political dissident. Engaging with archival materials and literary analysis of works produced by the residents of psychiatric asylums, the project draws connections among seemingly unrelated temporal, spatial, and social conditions to problematize the contemporary construction of global mental health. Besides research, Nguyễn is also a practicing psychotherapist, specializing in traumatic stress in children and adolescents. She grew up in Vietnam.
Location: Goodman South Library, 2222 South Park St., Madison, WI 53713