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. As a trained historian, she is particularly interested in how constructions of gender inform the comportment and performances of the body, religious beliefs, and political ideologies in Africa. Mougoué’s book, Gender, Separatist Politics and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon (University of Michigan Press, 2019) received the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize, given annually by the Western Association of Women Historians to recognize the best monograph in the field of history and the 2021 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, awarded annually by the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association for an outstanding book that prioritizes African women’s experiences. The Washington Post selected the book for its 2020 summer reading list.

Mougoué has guest-edited two scholarly journal issues: “Bodily Practices and Aesthetic Rituals in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Africa” (African Studies Review, 2019) and “Gender and Sexuality in African Futurism” (Feminist Africa, 2021). She 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, considers scholarly calls to expand definitions of the African diaspora, contributing to a body of scholarship that rarely recognizes internal diasporas rooted in Africa. She uses the early spread of Baha’i, a religion with tenets of racial and gender equality, to illuminate the dynamism of transnational diasporic connections among indigenous, or local, Africans in mid-twentieth century Africa. Mougoué is co-editing a volume on the state of scholarship on African feminist history and guest-editing an academic journal issue titled, “First Ladies of Africa: Beyond Femocracy and Wifeism?”