Education

Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley, 2017

Fields of Interest

Contemporary African History, African Women's History, Oral History, Modern Global History, Transnational Feminisms,  Gender and Militarism, African Diaspora, and the Politics of Cross-Border Migration in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

I am a member of the African Feminist Initiative and serve on the editorial advisory board of Feminist Africa. 

Courses taught

World History since 1500, African History, Transnational Feminisms, Twentieth Century Pan African Thought and Practice, Women and War. 

Representative Publications

Makana, Selina. “Women in Postcolonial Africa.”In The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Women’s History. Edited by Dorothy Hodgson et. al New York: Oxford University Press, June 2020. 

Makana, Selina. “Owning Her Rightful Place: The Intellectual and Activist Life of Charlotte Manye Maxeke,” Gender and History 31, 2 (July 2019): 444-459.

Makana, Selina. “Women in Nationalist Movements.” In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. Edited by Thomas Spear. New York: Oxford University Press, June 2019. 

(Book review) “Women and the Egyptian Revolution: Engagement and Activism during the 2011 Arab Uprisings,” by Nermin Allam for Gender & Society (January 2019). 

(Book Review) “Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945-1960,” by Nicholas Grant for H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews (Summer 2018). 

Makana, Selina. “Motherhood as Activism in the Angolan People’s War, 1961-1975.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 15, 2 (2017): 353-381. 

Representative Conferences

“É Maluqueira: Thinking through Madness in the Age of Neoliberalization in Post-war Angola.” Harvard University, 27 September, 2021. 

“Motherhood as Activism in Angola’s People’s War.” Nelson Mandela University& Rhodes University, 24 July, 2020. 

“Whose Truth, Whose History: Monuments and the Politics of Public Memory in Postwar Angola” Columbia University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa, 28 Feb, 2019.

“The Meridians Project: A Roundtable on Scholarship, Mentorship, and Alternative Methods of Knowledge Production,” National Women’s Studies Association, San Francisco, November 2019.

“Monuments and Monumental Silences: Memory and Its Discontent in Postwar Angola.” North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa Burlington, Vermont, 26-28 April 2019. 

“Challenges of African Feminist Histories and Futures.”African Feminist Initiative workshop organized by Penn State University, State College, PA, 4-7 April, 2019. 

“Monuments and Monumental Silences: Gender and the Politics of Memorializing Violent Histories in Postwar Angola.” Rutgers University, New Jersey, October 9, 2018.

“The Ugly History of This Country Lives in Me”: The Wounded Female Body as Archive.” National Women’s Studies Association, Atlanta, 8-11 November, 2018.

“Other Ways of Knowing: African Women as Cultivators of Knowledge.” Sage Philosophy Workshop, Nairobi, Kenya, 19-25 May, 2018. 

“The Political Uses of Motherhood Grief and Rage in National Liberation Struggles: The Case of Angola.” National Women’s Studies Association, Baltimore, 16-19 November, 2017. 

“Feminist Ethnography and Transnational Politics in Africa.” African Feminist Initiative workshop organized by Penn State University, State College, PA, 22-24 September, 2016.

“‘They Were Here to Help Us’: Translocal Narratives of War in Angola.” 12th North Eastern Workshop on Southern Africa Burlington, Vermont, 15-17 April 2016. 

Current projects

I am currently working on my first monograph about women and nation making in the twentieth century Angola.