معرفی
Abosede George serves as Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Director of Columbia's Institute of African Studies. A historian of Modern Africa, she specializes in West African urban history with concentrated focus on Lagos, youth and childhood studies, women and gender, and migration patterns across colonial and postcolonial contexts.
Her educational trajectory includes a B.A. in History and Political Science from Rutgers University (1998), followed by M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2006) in History from Stanford University. Prior to joining Columbia in 2007, she held an Assistant Professor position at Trinity College.
George's research interrogates intersections of gender, youth, and urban development through frameworks of social reform and transnational exchange. Her acclaimed monograph Making Modern Girls (2014) examines colonial-era girlhood and labor in Lagos, while current work investigates 19th-century migrant communities' reshaping of citizenship in Lagos. She teaches courses spanning African urban history, childhood studies, and gender dynamics.
Recent publications reveal evolving scholarly engagement with neoliberalism's impact on African youth, colonial subjecthood through human-animal relations, and Lagos as a site of architectural transnationalism. Her work consistently centers African agency within global historical processes while challenging Western theoretical frameworks.
Award highlights include the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize (2015), Tow Professorship (2022-2024), and fellowships from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (2022-2023) and University of Pennsylvania Wolf Humanities Center (2021-2022).
George actively mentors junior colleagues across U.S. and Nigerian institutions while serving on executive boards of the African Studies Association Women’s Caucus (which she co-convenes), Global Urban History Project, and Society for History of Childhood and Youth. Her institutional leadership extends to the Columbia University Senate and advisory roles at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
