Conveners: Wale Adebanwi, Julia Viebach, Tim Livsey
Speakers: Dan Hodgkinson (University of Oxford), Luke Melchiorre (Universidad de los Andes) and Marcia Schenck (Freie Universität Berlin)
Dan Hodgkinson is a Departmental Lecturer in African History and Politics at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development. He received his DPhil in International Development at the same institution in April 2018. His thesis, Marked Out: An Oral History of Zimbabwean Student Activism, 1957 to present, explores how four generations of student activists tried to lead radical projects of political transformation, which shaped their lives and national politics, as well as the present-day uses of these activist stories today. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals and books that include: Africa, the Journal of Southern African Studies, and The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties. His research interests include: oral history and storytelling, youth in Africa, intellectual history, the politics of Zimbabwe and Southern Africa, and protest studies.
Luke Melchiorre is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, having recently completed his PhD at the University of Toronto in the Department of Political Science in 2018. In the past, he has taught courses at the University of Toronto and worked as a Research Associate at the University of Nairobi, a Research Fellow at the University of Dar es Salaam and Visiting Researcher at Los Andes. He has also been the recipient of a number of awards, including the 2013 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Doctoral Grant, a New College Senior Fellowship at the University of Toronto in 2015, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship on two separate occasions in 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. His research interests include African politics (with a regional focus on East Africa), nation-building and state formation, and the politics of youth. His newest project will be a comparative study of the emergence of populism within African states. To date, his work has been published in AFRICA, Journal of Modern African Studies and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.
Marcia C. Schenck is assistant professor (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute, Free University Berlin. She received her PhD in history at Princeton University in September 2017 and holds a MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation Socialist Solidarities and their Aftermath: Histories and Memories of Angolan and Mozambican migrants to the German Democratic Republic, 1975-2015, traces the migration experience and migrant memories of Angolan and Mozambican migrants to East Germany. Peer-reviewed articles have appeared in African Economic History, Labor History, Stichproben and Atelier. Her research interests include the history of refuge seeking, migration history, labor history, African history, global history, micro history, and oral history. She can be reached at marcia.schenck@fu-berlin.de