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Inaugural – Fall 2023 Africa Talks Events

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Inaugural Speakers

September 27th

Emerging Insights from the 2023 Elections in Zimbabwe 

Tinashe Hofisi
Law School, UW-Madison

Bio

Tinashé Hofisi is a human rights lawyer and doctoral candidate with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. His research examines the emergence of constitutional courts in common law Africa. Tinashé was a constitutional litigator with the Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights for seven years and argued several cases in the Constitutional Court. He graduated with an LLM from Loyola University, Chicago and is a Mandela Washington Fellow under the Young African Leaders Initiative. He is also an IFES Manatt Fellow and an ILS Graduate Fellow. Tinashé holds certificates in Constitution-building in Africa and Strategic Human Rights Litigation from the Central European University. Since the fall of 2020, he has been a lecturer in the Centre for Law, Society and Justice, where he developed an interdisciplinary course on courts, constitutionalism and human rights.

October 25th

“Manhood today is money”: New Conceptions and Shifting Interpretations of Masculinity among the Kuria People of Western Kenya

Mwita Muinko
Department of African Cultural Studies, UW-Madison

Bio

Mwita is a Graduate Teaching Assistant and doctoral candidate in the department of African Cultural Studies. His research examines the relationship between language and gender, with a particular emphasis on how masculinity is constructed and expressed in an African context. He has a keen interest in auto-ethnographic methods and narrative research. He teaches both Swahili language and other Africa-related courses.

December 6th

Taking African Cartoons Seriously, Again: The Multimodal Art of  Coping with the Postcolonial Incredible

Headshot of Tolulope Akinwole

Tolulope Akinwole
Department of English, UW-Madison

Bio

Tolulope is a doctoral candidate in English at UW-Madison. His research interests revolve around global Black literatures, African cultural studies, and critical geography. He is currently a dissertation fellow at UW-Madison’s Institute for Research in the Humanities, where he is completing his research on literary and cultural representations of automobility in postcolonial Africa. He obtained master’s degrees in Literary Studies, African Cultural Studies, and English Language from UW-Madison and the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He is associate editor of Africanwriter.com, an online magazine of contemporary African and African diaspora literatures, and he manages Africacartoons.com. His research has been supported by the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Associations, the African Studies Research Award, the Ebrahim Hussein Research Fellowship, and the Graduate School at UW-Madison.