OusseinaAlidou

Ousseina Alidou, Associate Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Center for African Studies at Rutgers, was the recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Alumni Award of the Africa-America Institute, a US-based organization dedicated to the promotion of capacity building in Africa through higher education and training. The award was presented to Alidou on December 10, 2010 at the Institute’s Twenty-Sixth Annual Awards Gala in New York City in recognition of her scholarly accomplishments and her work in helping “to shape the material and intellectual lives and perspectives of young people – especially women – from all walks of life, across the United States, in African countries, and in other parts of the world.”

Professor Alidou has a trans-disciplinary research orientation with a focus on linguistics, cultural politics and gender studies, with primary research focusing mainly on the study of women’s discourses and literacy practices in Afro-Islamic societies; African women’s agency; African women’s literatures; Gendered discourses of identity and the politics of cultural production in Francophone African countries. In 2006 Professor Alidou was awarded the Rutgers University Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence “in recognition of her significant contributions in the areas of linguistics, literature and culture and gender studies, particularly her highly innovative interpretations of Islam relating to women and of new individual and collective social practices in Africa.”

Her book, Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), a runner-up for The ASA 2007 Women’s Caucus Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, explores women’s agency through their contribution in religious and secular education, public politics and the performing arts. Professor Alidou’s current research project is on Kenya Muslim Women’s Discourses on Citizenship and Human Rights.