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Faculty Fellow

Adom Getachew

Professor of Political Science University of Chicago

Biography

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. Her first book, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, reconstructs an account of self-determination offered in the political thought of Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists during the height of decolonization in the twentieth century. She holds a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University. She is on the faculty board of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.

Featured Project

Silhouettes of people walking in front of a mural of a cityscape

The Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context

2018 – 2022

Projects

Pan-Africa: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics

A Kerry James Marshall sculpture depicting Africa

Pan-Africa: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics

A series of discussions will explore the links between Pan-African politics and cultural production.

In the view of this project’s leaders, Pan-Africanism articulates a universality comparable in its reach to Marxism. It has guided independence movements and anticolonial struggles in dozens of countries around the world where the majority of inhabitants are of African descent; it has shaped the...