Diaspora and Migration

The mobility and mixing of peoples, products, ideas, and socio-political systems have characterized much of human history although the late second millennium rise of nation-states has obscured this reality and its implications for historical transformations. The Diaspora and Migration thematic field seeks to complicate nationalist narratives by restoring migratory subjects and their attendant complexities, hybridities, and ellipses to our contemporary understandings of how socio-cultural processes and networks have adapted, ruptured, and re-emerged in the globalizing past. We also focus on the transmission through transcontinental migration of ideas and cultural forms in the modern era, whether in the fields of literature, religion, science, the arts, or scholarship.

Our research strengths include intra-African movements of people instigated by state formation, politics, trade, and culture; as well as the global dimensions covering the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean, and Atlantic diasporas. We explore patterns of African integration into the world system through multiple approaches that reveal the internal and external processes and consequences of major historical developments.

Diaspora and Migration faculty list