Gabeba Baderoon

Gabeba Baderoon is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Studies at Penn State, and holds courtesy appointments in Comparative Literature and the School of International Affairs. She writes on representations of Islam, slavery, race and sexuality, as well as on portrayals of private life in South Africa. In addition, Baderoon is a widely published poet, and her new collection, The History of Intimacy, will be published in August 2018. She co-directs the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State with Alicia Decker, with whom she co-edited a forthcoming special issue of the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism on the state of the field of African feminism.  Among Baderoon’s honors are an Extraordinary Professorship of English at Stellenbosch University, the Daimler Award for South African Poetry and fellowships from the African Gender Institute, the Nordic Africa Institute, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Sainsbury/Linbury Trust and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. Baderoon received a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town, and has held Post-doctoral fellowships in the Africana Research Center at Penn State and the “Islam, African Publics and Religious Values” Project at the University of Cape Town.  With Dr Sa’diyya Shaikh and Dr Nina Hoel, she co-organized a transnational project on “Theorizing Gender and Islam,” which has hosted two international conferences and published a special issue of the Journal for Islamic Studies. Baderoon is the author of Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-apartheid, which received the 2017 Best Non-Fiction Monograph award from the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body, The Museum of Ordinary Life and A hundred silences.