Madina Thiam joins as Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and History. She studies Mali and West Africa from the 18th to the 20th century, with interests in the social histories of Muslim societies in the Sahel and the African Diaspora, French imperialism, and decolonization. She is completing a book manuscript that mobilizes research in multilingual and multisited archives to offer a new history of revolutionary movements, slavery, empire and migrations in the modern era. Rooted in the Sahel and straddling the Atlantic and Saharan worlds, the book unfolds through the vantage points and experiences of West African Muslims.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of African History, History in Africa, and the CODESRIA Bulletin, among other venues. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Mellon Foundation. In parallel, Thiam serves as co-director of the Projet Archives des Femmes, a collective that preserves the histories of Malian women’s anti-colonial and feminist struggles, and organizes a summer school with colleagues from the University of Bamako.

This past year, Thiam was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and also delivered the 7th William Allen Brown memorial lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her PhD in African History from UCLA, and joins Johns Hopkins from New York University, where she taught from 2022 to 2025 as the James Weldon Johnson Assistant Professor of History.