Mahmood Mamdani is the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government. He was also professor and executive director of Makerere Institute of Social Research (2010-2022) in Kampala, where he established an inter-disciplinary doctoral program in Social Studies. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1974 and specializes in the study of colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonisation. His works explore the intersection between politics and culture, a comparative study of colonialism since 1452, the history of civil war and genocide in Africa, the Cold War and the War on Terror, the history and theory of human rights, and the politics of knowledge production. Prior to joining the Columbia faculty, Mamdani was a professor at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (1973–1979), Makerere University in Uganda (1980–1993), and the University of Cape Town (1996–1999).
He has received numerous awards and recognitions, including being listed as one of the "Top 20 Public Intellectuals" by Foreign Policy (US) and Prospect (UK) magazine in 2008. In 2021, he was nominated Among ‘The World’s Top 50 Thinkers’ by Prospect Magazine, UK.
- Yann Allard-Tremblay
- Rauna Kuokkanen
- Lorenzo Veracini
- Adam J. Barker & Emma Battell Lowman
- Adam Dahl
- Didier Zúñiga
- Catherine Lu
- Kelly Aguirre
- Mohamed Sesay
- Tyler Caux-Loohuizen
- Olivier Samson
- Kelsey Brady
- Talia Holy
Yann Allard-Tremblay
Yann Allard-Tremblay is assistant professor in the department of political science at McGill University. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Universities of St Andrews and Stirling. His current research focuses on the decolonization and Indigenization of political theory. His research has recently featured in Polity, Political Studies, the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy and The Review of Politics. He is a member of the Huron-Wendat First Nation. He can be reached at yann.allard-tremblay [at] mcgill.ca.
Rauna Kuokkanen
Rauna Kuokkanen is Research Professor of Arctic Indigenous Studies at the University of Lapland, Adjunct Professor at the University of Toronto and a 2021-2022 Fulbright Arctic Initiative Fellow. Her most recent book is the award-winning Restructuring Relations: Indigenous Self-Determination, Governance and Gender (Oxford UP, 2019), an Indigenous feminist investigation of Indigenous self-determination, governance and gender regimes in Indigenous political institutions. Professor Kuokkanen has recently published on the truth and reconciliation process in Finland and Nordic settler colonialism. She is from Ohcejohka/Utsjoki, Sápmi and previously lived in Canada for nearly 20 years.
Lorenzo Veracini
Lorenzo Veracini teaches history and politics at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. His research focuses on the comparative history of colonial systems and settler colonialism as a mode of domination. He has authored Israel and Settler Society (2006), Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010), The Settler Colonial Present (2015), and The World Turned Inside Out (2021). Lorenzo co-edited The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (2016), manages the settler colonial studies blog, and was Founding Editor of Settler Colonial Studies.
Adam J. Barker & Emma Battell Lowman
Adam Barker and Emma Battell Lowman are settler Canadian scholars originally from the overlapping territories of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples in what is currently called southern Ontario, currently living in Leicester, UK. Adam holds a PhD in Human Geography and has published widely on social movements and activism, especially non-Indigenous attempts at solidarity with decolonial Indigenous-led movements. His most recent book, Making and Breaking Settler Space, has just been released by UBC Press, and constitutes a sustained examination of the settlement of Canada and the United States of America as the product of colonial assemblage, and intervenes in settler failures to support Indigenous communities. He is currently a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Sheffield, UK. Emma holds a PhD in Sociology, with a focus on historical knowledge production, relationality, and the role of Christian missionaries in settler colonization. She has also published on such diverse topics as the post-mortem punishment of criminal corpses, Chinook jargon and literacy among Indigenous people in the early 20th century, and the affective aspects of researching in archives. She is the lead author (with Adam) of Settler: Colonialism and Identity in 21st Century Canada, which was released in 2015 and has been widely used in teaching and research on settler colonialism. She currently holds a variety of academic positions, including as an instructor in the Indigenous Bachelor of Social Work program for Yellowhead Tribal College, AB.
Adam Dahl
Adam Dahl is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on American political thought, democratic theory, slavery and abolitionism, and political theories of empire and colonialism. He is the author of Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (University Press of Kansas, 2018). His research has appeared widely in peer-reviewed journals such as Perspectives on Politics, Journal of Politics, Contemporary Political Theory, and Political Research Quarterly, among others. His research has also received financial support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS); the Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies (CLACLS); the W.E.B. Du Bois Center; and the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies (IHGMS).
Didier Zúñiga
I am a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University, where I work under the supervision of Hasana Sharp. I am also affiliated with McGill’s Research Group on Constitutional Studies. I received my PhD in Political Theory from the University of Victoria, British Columbia, in July 2020. I was born and raised in Mexico City. My research interests lie primarily in environmental political thought, focusing mainly on feminist theories and Indigenous and decolonial politics. I am currently working on a project on the intersection of ecology, technology, and ontology, with a particular focus on Mexico and Mesoamerican worlds.
Catherine Lu
Catherine Lu is Professor of Political Science at McGill University, Director of Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill, as well as Coordinator of the Lin Centre’s Research Group on Global Justice. Her research focuses on critical and normative studies in international political theory on cosmopolitanism, global justice, settler and colonial injustice, structural injustice, human rights, intervention, alienation, and reconciliation. She is the author of two books: Just and Unjust Interventions in World Politics: Public and Private (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), and Justice and Reconciliation in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2017). The latter won four international book prizes. She received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany) in 2018.
Kelly Aguire
Dr. Kelly Aguirre (she/they) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria situated in lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories. A queer mestiza of Nahua and ñuu savi ancestry, she was born in Mexico City and grew up in Winnipeg, MB Treaty 1 territories, Anishnaabe, Cree and Métis homelands among their mother’s settler family of German-Russian and Welsh descent. Kelly’s areas of research are Indigenous politics, decolonial and critical theory, methodological ethics, rhetoric and poetics, and the roles of political theorists as storytellers of political life. She is newly embarking on work considering IBPOC (Indigenous, Black and people of colour) experiences of disability and neurodiversity in decolonial movements and contributions to otherwise political imaginations or reworlding projects.
Mohamed Sesay
Mohamed Sesay is an Assistant Professor in Social Science and Coordinator of the African Studies Program at York University. He is also a member of the UKRI GCRF Gender Justice and Security Hub hosted by the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. His sole-authored book, Domination Through Law: The Internationalization of Legal Norms in Postcolonial Africa, is the winner of the 2022 ISA Northeast's Lee Ann Fujii Book Award.
Tyler Caux-Loohuizen
Tyler Caux-Loohuizen (he/him) is currently pursuing his PhD in Political Science at McGill University. Tyler’s research focuses on decolonization, Indigenous-Canada relations, gender and politics, and political theories of land and place, and engages generally with Indigenous (and) feminist thought and methods. His current (ongoing) work considers some of the ways in which stories—and practices of storytelling—reveal, reflect, and generate political imaginaries and/as political relations by theorizing stories as relations, and relations as the constitutive fabrics of politics. Tyler was raised in Saskatoon, SK, is Saulteaux/Cree and of mixed settler (Dutch/French) descent.
Olivier Samson
Olivier completed a minor in physics and a bachelor’s in philosophy at Université de Montréal (UdeM). He is currently a graduate student in political philosophy at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and a fellow of the Groupe de Recherche Interuniversitaire en Philosophie Politique (GRIPP). His master’s thesis, titled Between complicity and disalienation: the political repositioning of settler Canadians in response to contemporary indigenous struggles, navigates between his main fields of interest: Indigenous studies, theories of settler colonialism and decolonization, structural injustice theory, and critical theory.
Kelsey Brady
Kelsey Brady is Anishinaabekwe and is a member of the Algonquins of Greater Golden Lake First Nation. She obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at McGill University under the supervision of Professor Jacob T. Levy, and will be pursuing her PhD at the University of British Columbia under the joint supervision of Professor Glen Coulthard and Professor Anna Jurkevics. Her paper "There Are No Such Things ad Territorial Rights" seeks to decolonize the literature on territorial rights by presenting Indigenous stewardship-based alternatives to the proprietary conception of territorial right. She is also the Manager of Funding Development and Administration at the First Peoples Justice Center of Montreal.
Talia Holy
Talia Devi Holy (she/they) is an MA student in Political Science at the University of British Columbia. Her current research is predominantly situated within contemporary political theory, with a focus on critical theory, decolonial theory, and identity politics. In particular, Talia is interested in how social movements in settler colonial contexts are working in solidarity to create political freedom, despite division between their goals or political theorizations.This year, she has presented her research at the Stanford Political Theory Graduate Conference and at the University of British Columbia Political Science Graduate Student Conference. She is a settler scholar of mixed Sri Lankan and Slovakian heritage, currently living on unceded xʷməθkwəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh territory.
