JACQUELINE-BETHEL MOUGOUÉ is Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States with additional affiliations in the Department of History and the Department of Gender & Women’s Studies. Previously, she was an assistant professor of African history at Baylor University in the United States (2013-2019). As a trained historian, Mougoué is particularly interested in how constructions of gender inform performances of the body, religious beliefs, and political ideas in mid-20th century West Africa. Mougoué’s book, Gender, Separatist Politics and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon received the 2020 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize and the 2021 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. The Washington Post selected the book for its 2020 summer reading list. Mougoué was selected as one of 15 African women historians shaping understandings of Africa’s historical past by AMAKA magazine in 2022.

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 institutions, including Paris Diderot University (France), the University of Leuven (Belgium), the National University of Ireland Galway (Republic of Ireland), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Italy), and the University of Buea (Cameroon). Mougoué currently sits on the editorial boards for Feminist Africa, Journal of Women’s History, and Gender & History. 

Mougoué’s second book project, Pan-African Lives, Racial Politics, and Belonging in Africa, expands definitions of the African diaspora and decenters western locales/perspectives. The project focuses on a diverse group of individuals of color—Africans, Black Americans, Persians, and Indians—to recognize the development of diasporic experiences in Africa amongst global minorities in mid-twentieth century West Africa (1950s-1970s). She is co-editing a volume on the state of scholarship on African feminist history and guest-editing a history journal issue, “First Ladies of Africa: Beyond Femocracy and Wifeism?”

Mougoué currently works with doctoral students in the Department of African Cultural Studies and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne in Germany.