Mahmood Mamdani is from Kampala, Uganda and became director of MISR in 2010. He received his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the Department of Anthropology and Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Institute of African Studies from 1999 to 2004.
Lyn Ossome is a Senior Research Fellow and Assistant to the Director (Research and Students Affairs). She received a PhD in Political Studies from Wits University and was previously Postdoctoral Fellow at the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University. Her research specializations are in feminist political economy, land and agrarian studies and feminist political theory. Her current work deals with questions of social justice through a critical engagement with histories of women in politics.
Samson A. Bezabeh, is a Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) and a permanent fellow of the African Studies Center- Leiden, the Netherlands. He was previously a Post-doctoral researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has been affiliated with the University of Bergen, the University of Exeter, and Addis Ababa University. His research interests include diaspora studies, state- society interaction, colonialism, religion (Islam and Orthodox Christianity) as well as issues of citizenship, ethnicity, and class in Africa.
Virginie Tallio defended her Ph.D in Ethnology and Social Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (France) in 2007. She worked as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Germany) from August 2006 to February 2009 and as a researcher at the Centro de Estudos Internacionais (ex-Africanos) do ISCTE-Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (Portugal) from May 2009 to May 2014.
Lawyer Kafureeka is a Research Associate at MISR. He also teaches in the department of Development Studies at Makerere University.
Email: kalawyer1@yahoo.co.uk
Florence Ebila has Doctoral and Masters’ Degrees in African Languages and Literature/ Women and Gender Studies, from the University of Wisconsin- Madison, a Masters’ Degree in Women and Gender Studies and a Bachelors Degree in Literature, from Makerere University.
She is a lecturer in the School of Women and Gender Studies Makerere University, Kampala. Her Doctoral dissertation focused on how African women’s (auto)biographies voiced gender and nationalism in Kenya, Uganda and Liberia.
Benedetta Lanfranchi is a Research Fellow at MISR teaching Pre-Modern and Modern Social and Political Thought .
She obtained her PhD in African Philosophy from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London with a thesis on traditions of justice in Acholiland.
She then held a Postdoc at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies (BIGSAS).
She came to MISR as a Visiting Research Fellow in 2017 and then joined as a Research Fellow in 2018.
Dr. Matteo Caravani is a political economist lecturing the agrarian question in modern history and the history of economic theory at the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) in Uganda. He graduated from the faculty of Economics, University of Rome "La Sapienza" and he was awarded a PhD in Development Studies at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) University of Sussex, in Brighton.
Grace-Edward Galabuzi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Makerere Institute for Social Research, Makerere University. He has served as an Associate Professor in the Politics and Public Administration Department, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada and a Research Associate at the Centre for Social Justice in Toronto.
Laury Ocen obtained his PhD from Makerere University in 2017, and is currently a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Makerere Institute of Social Research. He has researched expansively on the politics and poetics of war memorials in northern Uganda, particularly, how the agency of monuments constitute new imaginaries of peace architecture in ways that activate voices initially silenced by the grand and master narratives of the state and NGOs. Ocen was a recipient of the Next Generation Social Science Research fellowship for dissertation completion 2015.
