Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué 

Jacqueline-Bethel Mougoué is Assistant Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with additional affiliations in the Department of History and the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. She is particularly interested in how constructions of gender inform the comportment and performances of the body, religious beliefs, and political ideologies. Mougoué’s book, Gender, Separatist Politics and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019) received the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize, given annually by the Western Association of Women Historians to recognize the best monograph in the field of history. The Washington Post selected her book for their 2020 summer reading list. Mougoué  has been invited to give plenary talks on her research at various international academic institutions, including Paris Diderot University (France), University of Leuven (Belgium) and University of Buea (Cameroon). Mougoué currently sits on the editorial boards for Feminist Africa, Journal of Women’s History, and  Gender & History. 

Mougoué is currently working on additional projects. Her second book project, Diasporas in Africa, uses the early spread of Baha’i, a religion with tenets of racial and gender equality, to illuminate the dynamism of transnational diasporic connections in Africa. She considers scholarly calls to expand definitions of the African diaspora, contributing to a body of scholarship that rarely recognizes intra-African diaspora.  She is co-editing a volume on the state of scholarship on African feminist history and guest editing two journal issues titled, “First Ladies of Africa: Beyond Femocracy and Wifeism?” and “Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism.”

Personal bio here.

See Mougoué’s abbreviated c.v. here.

Background image credit:Joseph Chila, a Cameroonian photographer. Image from here.