People

Our Team
Research Associates
Staff
Our Network

Our Team

Leonardo Villalón Email - UF faculty page	Leonardo A. Villalón, coordinator of the Sahel Research Group, is Professor of Political Science and African Studies at the University of Florida. He has held several administrative posts at the univeristy, including Dean of the International Center and Associate Provost (2014-2022) and Director of the Center for African Studies (2002-2011). Villalón holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and degrees from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris, the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University, and Louisiana State University. He has carried out research in the six countries of the Sahel (Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, and Chad), on such topics as religion and democratization, electoral issues, education, state resilience and political stability, and the impact of climate change. His research has been supported by Fulbright and Carnegie Scholars awards, and by grants from the US State Department, the UK Department for International Development (DfID), the US DOD Minerva Initiative, and the Sahel and West Africa Club of the OECD. He has published numerous works on the Sahel, and is editor of the Oxford Handbook of the African Sahel
Renata Serra Email - UF faculty page	Renata Serra is Senior Lecturer in the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida, core faculty member in the Master in Sustainable Development Practice program and Lead researcher for the Enabling Environment team within the USAID Feed the Future Livestock Systems Innovation Lab at UF, co-leading both the Policy and Gender Teams. An economist by training, she earned her PhD from Cambridge University (UK) in 1997. Her expertise focuses on agricultural and livestock policies, the political economy of reforms, gender issues and household decision-making, child labor, and social capital, with particular attention to countries in Franco-phone West Africa. Dr. Serra has done consultancy work for Catholic Relief Services, the International Cocoa Institute, Oxfam UK, DFID, SIDA, the World Bank, and Save the Children UK. She is currently co-PI for the LIVT project.
Abdoulaye Kane Email - UF faculty page	Abdoulaye Kane holds a joint position between the Center for African Studies and the Department of Anthropology. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology in 2001 from the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Dr. Kane specializes in international migration and transnationalism with an emphasis on Senegalese migrants in Europe and in the United States. He has recently completed a book manuscript on the practice of transnationalism by the Haalpulaar migrants of the Senegal River Valley. He is the co-editor, with Todd Leedy, of "African Migrations, Patterns and Perspective" (Indiana University Press, 2013). He also co-edited, with Hansjoerg Dilder, and Stacey Langwick, "Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa, Transnational Health and Healing" (Indiana University Press 2012). He is currently working on a book manuscript exploring the building of Tijani transnational religious circuits connecting religious cities in Senegal, Fez, and satellite communities in France.
Fiona Mc Laughlin Email - UF faculty page	Fiona Mc Laughlin is Professor of Linguistics and African Languages. She specializes in the sociolinguistics of urban language contact in the Sahel, as well as in the phonology and morphology of Seereer, Wolof and Pulaar, three Atlantic (Niger-Congo) languages spoken in Senegal. She has a secondary research interest in Islam and popular culture. Mc Laughlin has a PhD in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former director of the West African Research Center in Dakar and has taught at the Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger, and at the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal.
Alioune Sow Email - UF faculty page	Alioune Sow holds a joint appointment in French and African Studies at the University of Florida. He is the Director of the France Florida Research Institute. His research interests include democratic transition and cultural forms in francophone West Africa, focusing especially on memoirs, theater and films in Mali, as well as migration and theater practices in France. His current book project entitled Transitional memoirs, examines the interplay between letters, politics and the cultures of memory in post military Mali and in the Sahel. His articles on confessions and testimonies in democratic Mali, refugee theater in Bamako, political intuition in autobiographies of childhood, Malian cinema and military, Malian television serials and democratic experience, have been published in Critical Interventions, Social Dynamics, African Studies Review, Biography. He has also edited special issues of Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines and Etudes Littéraires Africaines. Vestiges et Vertiges appeared with Artois Presses Université in 2011. Alioune Sow holds a PhD from the Sorbonne.
Sarah McKune Email - UF faculty page	Sarah McKune is an Associate Professor in the Center for African Studies and in the Department of Environmental and Global Health in the College of Public Health and Health Professions. She holds a B.A. in French and Sociology from Wofford College, an MPH from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Ecology from the University of Florida. Prior to work in academia, McKune spent nearly a decade in development, working on various global health projects, including HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, maternal and child health, nutrition, and food security, much of this work occurring with NGOs throughout West Africa. Her doctoral research investigated the perceived risk of climate change on adaptation and livelihood vulnerability of pastoralists in eastern Niger. She held a postdoc at UF with the Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security program of the CGIAR to improve social equity of program benefits, particularly among women, in Kaffrine, Senegal, as well as sites in Kenya and Nepal. Her research utilizes mixed methodologies, both quantitative and qualitative in nature, and seeks to explain the complex, system dynamics that affect child growth and nutritional outcomes, including factors such as household hygiene and sanitation, livestock ownership, climate change, and gender dynamics within the household. She serves as the Health and Human Nutrition Cross Cutting Theme leader for the USAID Feed the Future Livestock System Innovation Lab (LSIL) at UF, which aims to improve the nutrition of children under five and pregnant and lactating women through increased consumption of animal source foods. She has ongoing work in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Niger.
Sebastian Elischer Email - UF faculty page	Sebastian Elischer is an Associate Professor of African Politics at the University of Florida. Prior to joining UF, Dr Elischer was Assistant Professor of comparative politics at the Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany) and a research fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. He holds a PhD in comparative politics from Jacobs University Bremen (Germany), a dual MA from the Free University of Berlin and the George Washington University in Washington DC, and a BA from the University of Wales/Aberystwyth (UK). He is the author of Political Parties in Africa: Ethnicity and Party Formation published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, Democratization, Review of African Political Economy and similar journals. His second book, Salafism and Political Order in Africa, will be available in August 2021. It examines how Sahelian states and states in East Africa have tried to supervise the influx and the practice of Salafi communities since independence. The project received funding by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the University of Florida, and the American Political Science Association.
Benjamin Soares Email - UF faculty page	Benjamin Soares is the Director of the Center for Global Islamic Studies. He is a scholar of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa whose research focuses particularly on religious life from the early 20th century to the present. He has conducted research in Mali, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan, as well as among West African Muslims in Europe and Asia. In recent work, he has looked at the connections between changing modalities of religious expression, different modes of belonging, and emergent social imaginaries in colonial and postcolonial West Africa. In addition to ongoing interests in religious encounters and religion, media, and the public sphere, he is studying contemporary Muslim public intellectuals in Africa. He is a co-editor of Africa, the journal of the International African Institute (London), and he also co-edits the International African Library book series (Cambridge).
Olivier Walther Email - UF faculty page - Personal website	Olivier J. Walther is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. Using social network analysis, his research and teaching has focused on cross-border trade, cross-border cooperation and terrorism in West Africa. Fluent in English and French, Professor Walther spent part of his youth in West Africa and has worked in Niger, Nigeria, Mali, Ghana, Benin and Mauritania. His work combines geographic information systems, social network analysis, statistical analysis and qualitative interviews. His current research project funded by the OECD Sahel and West Africa Club studies political insecurity and transnational insurgencies in West Africa. Professor Walther has received support for his work from NASA, the National Science Foundation, the United Nations, and the OECD. Dr Walther is an Associate Editor of Political Geography and is on the executive committee of the African Borderlands Research Network (ABORNE).
Macodou Fall Email	Macodou Fall is a PhD student and a teaching assistant at the University of Florida Center for Global Islamic Studies. He holds a B.A and an M.A in English from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar and another M.A in African Studies from Ohio University. Macodou is interested in the study of Islam, Ajami literature, traditional religions, and popular culture in West Africa with a focus on the Senegalese Sufi Brotherhood, Muridiyya. His research project seeks to explore the Murid urban associations’ (Dahiras) various teaching methodologies, which also include singing, praise singing, and the interpretation of Murid texts (qasidas) via use of Wolofal (Ajami Wolof). Macodou is fluent in Wolof, French, and English and has taught Wolof at Ohio University.
Jamie Fuller Email	Jamie Fuller is a doctoral candidate in the department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. She received her B.A. in Anthropology, and her M.A. in African African-American Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research ethnographically explores the kinship building practices of Senegalese women living in the United States and their families at home across social media applications such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. Specifically, she asks how women orchestrate care from a distance using the communicative affordances of these apps to understand how they intervene in women’s lives to produce feelings of co-presence, obligation, and love. As more women move independently of male relatives, they encounter new opportunities and expectations linked to their gendered embodiment. By asking how female migrants employ affordances in producing culturally appropriate forms of communication, her research points to how kinship and obligation, key to the transfer of remittance funds between people in migration contexts, reemerge despite the structural dynamics of an increasingly global and dynamic transnational labor force. Highlighting this, her research sheds light on the sociality of mobility, remittances, obligation, and gendered embodiment.
Matthew Pflaum Email - Personal website	Matthew Pflaum is a PhD student in Geography advised by Dr. Walther. He holds an MSc in African Studies & International Development from the University of Edinburgh and an MPH in Global Health/infectious Disease from Emory University. Mr. Pflaum is examining pastoralist violence, mobility, and food security in Mali’s central Mopti region. He is interested in the central Sahel region around Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, and Mali, and the transnational dynamics of violence, particularly the intersections of communal violence and violent extremism and their outcomes. He is also interested in ethnicity, language, borders, governance, security, resources, and policies. Mr. Pflaum has spent time in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Bangladesh, Tanzania, and Vietnam.
Brahim Afrit Email	Brahim Afrit is a PhD student in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. He holds a BA in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Studies and an MA in Public Affairs from the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po). Additionally, Mr. Afrit completed an MSc in Entrepreneurship at the HEC Paris Business School before starting a career as a social entrepreneur in education in Algeria.  Mr. Afrit is interested in Islamic reformism, Sufism, and Salafism, and the ways in which these intersect with and influence the state, particularly in the field of education.
Baba Adou Email-personal website	Baba Adou is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science and a Graduate Research Assistant at the Sahel Research Group. Prior to joining UF, Baba worked as an instructor at both the University of Nouakchott and the Higher Institute of English in Mauritania. He taught General and Business English, Arabic, and International Relations. While in Mauritania, he was also involved in several research projects including "Oral History in Northwest Africa", a project carried out by Columbia University's Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life. He also worked as a translator, TOEFL Test auditor, and education entrepreneur. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Nouakchott and an M.A. in Global and International Studies from the University of Kansas. He is also a certified TEFL instructor with a Cambridge CELTA. His research interests include Islam and politics, democratization, and the dynamics of semi-authoritarian regimes in the Sahel. Baba has a solid foundation in classical Arabic literature and Islam. He is also an alumnus of the Fulbright Program. Languages: Arabic, English, French
Chris Fuglestad Email - personal website	Chris Fuglestad is a PhD student in Linguistic Anthropology. Originally from Green Bay, Wisconsin, he holds a Master of Professional French Studies degree in International Education from the . He also holds BA degrees in International Studies and French from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Oregon where he specialized in cross-cultural communication, indigenous studies, and ethnic identity. Chris has worked professionally in international higher education at the University of Oregon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Université Laval in Quebec, and at UT Health San Antonio. His research interests lie in the correlation of historical language policies to contemporary higher education internationalization strategies in the Sahel, especially Senegal. He is also interested in the geolinguistics and dialectology of French in the Sahel. Chris has lived in Senegal and has traveled through much of the Sahel. Languages: English, French, Wolof (intermediate), and Norwegian (intermediate).
Bill Dyer Email - personal website	Bill Dyer is a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Florida. In his research, he works with native speakers of the Sereer, Wolof, and Pulaar languages of Senegambia to investigate the grammar of these languages. Bill has been awarded a Boren Fellowship to study intensive Wolof this summer, followed by six months of linguistic research on Sereer and related Senegalese languages, in collaboration with professors at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar! He served in the US Peace Corps in Senegal. He speaks the Sereer language from his language training and the two years he spent working on health projects in a Sereer village. He has recently been training computer programs to automatically parse part-of-speech and grammatical relations in Wolof texts. Bill has put these same tools to use working as a graduate computational linguist on the University of Florida's Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South project. He graduated from the College of Charleston with a BA in Anthropology and completed an MA degree in linguistics at the University of Iowa. Bill seeks to integrate the sometimes-narrow focus of linguistics into scholarly dialogue on the Sahel region.
David Russell Email	David Russell is a PhD student in Geography at the University of Florida, advised by Dr. Walther. David has previously worked as a geographer of political violence, focusing on describing the patterns and effects of conflicts in the Middle East and North and West Africa. He most recently worked as a Senior Research Specialist at the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University. David has also worked on projects with the Middle East Institute, the University of Idaho, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the University of Florida. David also maintains a strong interest in how geopolitical rhetoric shapes views of the world. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, David graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in History, and from the University of Idaho with an MS in Geography.
Lacey Harris-Coble Email - Personal website	Lacey Harris-Coble is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida. She is interested in agricultural development and food security. Her research will focus on livestock trade networks in West Africa and study how external shocks such as border closures, disease outbreaks, droughts and other climatic factors affect regional trade activities. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia and a Master of Sustainable Development Practice from the University of Florida. Previously she was a project and research assistant at the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems.
Zhu Tang Email	Zhu Tang is a PhD student in the Department of Religion at the University of Florida. Before coming to UF, he earned his B.A. in Arabic from Sun Yat-sen University and M.A. in the same field from University of International Business and Economics in Beijing. His MA thesis examines Mauritania’s state-building through analyses of the history of Islamization and the relation between Islam and politics in Mauritania. His primary interests focus on the intersection of Islam and politics, contemporary Muslim thoughts, and the interaction between different Sufi orders in West African Sahelian countries like Mauritania and Mali.
Daniel Acosta Email	Daniel Acosta is a PhD student in Public Health with a concentration in One Health at the Department of Environmental and Global Health at the University of Florida (UF). He is an Industrial Engineer and holds a Master of Sustainable Development Practice from UF. He has done research on gender and intersectionality in the context of livestock vaccine value chains with pastoralist communities. He also did an internship at the Sahel and West Africa Club Secretariat at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) where his work was focused on climate change policies. He is interested in the impacts of climate change in health, through a One Health lens (human, animal, and environmental health).
Cory Satter Email	Cory Satter is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science. Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, Cory obtained his B.S. in Political Science at Arizona State University before obtaining his M.A. in International Cooperation on Human Rights at the University of Bologna in Italy. Cory's thesis explored the nexus between security, migration and development in Mali. He has moreover interned or worked in several countries, including Ghana, Israel/Palestine, Cyprus, Scotland and Italy. Cory's current research interests primarily focus on informal governance in the Sahel region and the intersection with climate change resilience and adaptation. He is passionate about place-making and participatory democracy in urban planning, especially in the Global South. He enjoys traveling and learning new languages. Cory speaks fluent Italian, advanced French and intermediate Spanish. He is currently learning Arabic as part of his FLAS fellowship.

Research Associates

Oumar Ba Email- Personal website	Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. He is as former Assistant Professor of Political Science at Morehouse College. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida in 2017. He also holds a M.A in political science from the University of Florida, a M.A. in political science from Ohio University, a M.A. in African Studies from Ohio University, a B.A. in international studies from The Ohio State University, and a B.A. in Geography from Université Cheikh Antra Diop in Dakar. His research focuses on the politics of international justice, the global governance of atrocity crimes, and the destruction of cultural heritage in conflict. Languages: Pulaar, Wolof, French, and English.
Adib Bencherif Email - Personal website	Dr. Adib Bencherif is an Assistant Professor in political science at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada. He served as a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Sahel Research Group at the University of Florida. Adib holds a B.A. from the School of International Relations in Paris, an M.A. in International Relations from Laval University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Ottawa. His research focuses on security issues and political violence in the Sahel, with a focus on the narratives and representations of Tuareg political elites in Mali and Niger. He is the author of several peer-reviewed articles published in Terrorism and Political Violence, Mediterranean Politics, The Canadian Journal of African Studies, Cahiers d'études africaines and Politique Africaine. He is fluent in French and English and proficient in Spanish, Arabic and Tamashek.
Mamadou Bodian Email- Personal website	Mamadou Bodian is a researcher at the Laboratoire d'Études Sociales of the Institut Fondamentale d'Afique Noire (IFAN) at Cheickh Anta Diop University in Dakar (UCAD). He holds a master's degree in sociology from UCAD and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Florida (USA). Dr. Bodian teaches sociology of religions at the University Assane Seck of Ziguinchor and political sociology at UCAD. He was the coordinator of the Fulbright Support Services Program in West Africa, based at the West Africa Research Center (WARC) in Dakar. Mamadou Bodian was the committee's coordinator charged with developing the curriculum for the Master's degree in Peace, Security, and Development at the Virtual University of Senegal (UVS). He is also involved in the supervision of the auditors at the Centre des Hautes Etudes en Défense et Sécurité (CHEDS) and the Institut de Défense du Sénégal (ISD). A founding member of the Sahel Research Group (SRG), Dr. Bodian was a researcher in the Sahel and West Africa program of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden. He has been serving as an expert for Freedom House (Mali) since 2015, Variety of Democracy (Mauritania) since 2015, and Afrobarometer (Senegal) since 2018. His research focuses on religion, politics, foreign policy, and security in the Sahel. He is the author of several articles and co-author of the book Entre le Savoir et le Culte: Activisme et mouvements religieux dans les universités du Sahel. Amalion, 2020.
Daniel Eizenga Email- Personal website	Daniel Eizenga is a Research Fellow at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies based at the National Defense University in Washington D.C. At the Africa Center, he is responsible for conducting policy-relevant research advancing understanding of pressing security challenges facing Africa. His research primarily focuses on countering violent extremism in the Sahel and the intersecting roles of civil-military relations, traditional institutions, and civil society across various regime trajectories of African states. Prior to joining the Africa Center, he was a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre FrancoPaix at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a Research Associate with the Sahel Research Group. He has presented his research to and collaborated with several academic and government institutions in both the United States and Canada, including the Canadian Forces College, the Joint Special Operations University, Special Operations Command Africa, the Royal Military College in St. Jean, Québec, the George C. Marshall Center, the United States Institute of Peace, and Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center at the Presidio in Monterey. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Florida and he has conducted extensive fieldwork in the Francophone African Sahel, primarily in Burkina Faso, Chad and Senegal.
Abdourahmane Idrissa Email- Personal website	Abdourahmane Idrissa is Senior Researcher in the African Studies Centre at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. His doctorate in political science, with a concentration on democratization and political Islam in Africa, was obtained at the University of Florida. Idrissa’s research expertise ranges from issues of states, institutions and democratization in Africa to Salafi radicalism in the Sahel and current projects on the history of state formation in Africa, with a focus both on the modern (Niger) and premodern eras (Songhay). Idrissa is the founder of EPGA a think tank in political economy in Niger, training students and coordinating projects based on methodologies of political economy analysis focused on migration, youth employment and demography. He is also associated with the Niamey based social science laboratory LASDEL and is on the editorial board of the African Studies Quarterly, at the University of Florida. He is the author of the book The Politics of Islam in the Sahel : Between Persuasion and Violence (Routledge, 2017). Together with Samuel Decalo he has recently published a completely new edition of the Historical Dictionary of Niger.
Jean-Hervé Jézéquel Email	Jean-Hervé Jézéquel is the Project Director for the Sahel at the International Crisis Group based in Dakar, Senegal, since 2013. His role requires extensive research and advocacy on the prevailing political and security issues in the central Sahel region in order to work towards promoting stability, security, and development. He has authored numerous reports and publications on violent conflicts in the central Sahel region. Jean-Hervé Jézéquel holds a PhD in African History from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2002). He taught at the University of Michigan (2004-2005), Emory University (2005-2007) and the University of Bordeaux (2009-2013). Jean-Hervé also worked for Doctors without Borders as field coordinator in Northern Liberia as well as Researcher and Research Director. He conducted studies on post-conflict situations (DRC, Liberia) as well as on Humanitarian interventions in complex crises (Ethiopia, Niger, Guinea). He co-authored a book on the food nutrition crisis with Xavier Crombé (Niger 2005. A not-so-natural Disaster, Columbia University Press, 2009)
Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim Email	Ibrahim Yahaya Ibrahim is Deputy Director based in Dakar of the Sahel Project of the International Crisis Group. His work covers Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. He received his Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Florida, where he was also a research assistant for the Minerva Initiative project on Institutional reform, social change and stability in the Sahel. His research interests relate to political economy, Islam, and humanitarianism in the Sahelian countries. He has a background in Sociology, Islamic Jurisprudence, and Management, with degrees from the Islamic University of Say and Abdou Moumouni University of Niamey. Ibrahim is also an alumnus of the Fulbright Program. He worked for four years with Islamic NGOs in Niger, including two years as the Executive Director of the Niger-office of Albasar International Foundation. He is a co-founder of the NGO Project Global Health. Languages: French, English, Arabic, and Hausa.
Marjatta Eilittä Email	Marjatta Eilittä is the Deputy Director for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems.  She received her Ph.D. in Agronomy with a minor in Food and Resource Economics from the University of Florida.  Her research was on soil fertility and green manures in tropical smallholder systems. She consequently worked 12 years in agricultural development in West Africa, mainly from a base in Ghana, but with regional responsibilities, including in the Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Northern Nigeria, and Senegal.  Her work covered soil fertility, crop production and inputs, national and regional policies, and value chain development. From 2011 to 2013 she led a USAID-funded project on regional trade in staple commodities and livestock, which sparked her interest in trade networks and corridors as well as the neglected role of regional trade, particularly between the Sahel and the coastal countries, in the regional food security.
Frédérick Madore Email - Personal website	Frédérick Madore is a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in the Religion, Morality and Boko in West Africa project. Frédérick was previously a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African Studies at the University of Florida. He completed his PhD in History at the Université Laval (Canada) in 2018. His research is comparative and explores Islam and Muslim societies in postcolonial francophone West Africa. He has conducted extensive fieldwork in Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Togo, focused on Islamic activism among youth and women, their appropriation of (new) media, and Muslim politics. Madore is developing an innovative digital archive database containing archival materials, newspaper articles, Islamic publications, photographs, and bibliographical references related to Islam in Burkina Faso. He is also the author of La construction d’une sphère publique musulmane en Afrique de l’Ouest (Presses de l’Université Laval/Hermann, 2016) on Islam in Burkina Faso.
Tatiana Smirnova Email - Personal Website	Tatiana Smirnova served as a Research Assistant Scientist in the Department of Geography at the University of Florida in 2019-2020. She worked on the project "Foreign interventions and transnational insurgencies in the Sahara-Sahel" funded through the Sahel and West Africa Club at the OECD. Dr. Smirnova completed her PhD in social anthropology at EHESS in Paris. She has worked as a Program Assistant at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City in 2007 and as a Human Resource Officer at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands in 2009. More recently, Dr. Smirnova has worked as an international consultant for Transparency International, Search for Common Ground, and the Danish Refugee Council in Niger. Dr. Smirnova is fluent in French, English, Russian and Hausa.

Staff

Isabelle Walther-Duc Email	Isabelle Walther-Duc is Program Assistant at the Sahel Research Group. She is in charge of the communication of the Sahel Research Group including publishing of the weekly newsletter, social media and updating SRG’s website. Isabelle holds a Master in Sociology from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and a Master in European Studies from the University of Southern Denmark. In her previous jobs, Isabelle has worked as social worker, office manager and French teacher. Isabelle’s interests lie in international issues and global dynamics. Her interest for Africa started when, as a student, she regularly traveled to Africa in countries such as Morocco, Mauritania, Niger and Mali. These travels as well as the various countries where she subsequently lived allowed her to develop her multicultural and interpersonal competencies. Languages: French, English, German and Danish (elementary knowledge).
Justine Decoster Email	Justine Decoster is Program Assistant at the Sahel Research Group. She is a UF student majoring in International Studies with a regional emphasis on Africa. Additionally, she has decided to minor in International Development & Humanitarian Assistance and Education. Before working with the SRG, Justine was a research assistant under the University of Florida's Dr. Alioune Sow. In collaboration with the University of Bamako and Carleton College, they explored and deciphered knowledge of Malian political independence figures and events. Before joining UF, Justine co-founded the Army of Angels non-profit organization to provide free educational services to Title 1 schools. She expanded their services by providing materialistic help to recently migrated families, going as far as delivering food, clothes, and furniture. Alongside this project, she worked for a national nonprofit organization, Scholarly Advice, to provide affordable and personalized education to students with disabilities. Using her fluency in French and Spanish, Justine aims to work in educational development, focusing on higher education opportunities for Sahelian students.
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Our Network

Rhoumour Ahmet Tchilouta Email - personal website	Rhoumour Ahmet Tchilouta is a PhD student in political geography with a co-tutoring between the University of Grenoble Alpes, and the University Abdou Moumouni of Niamey (Niger). He is carrying out his research at the PACTE research center (Grenoble Alpes University) and at GERMES (Groupe d'Etude et de Recherches Migrations, Espaces et Sociétés). Native of Agadez, Niger, Rhoumour holds a Master's degree in Geography, Planning, Environment and Development and a Master's degree in Social Sciences from the Grenoble Alpes University. His thesis focuses on the externalization of EU migration policies in the Sahara-Sahel region, with particular focus on Niger. He is particularly interested in understanding how Europe is influencing Niger's border management policies through its funding, norms, and manpower in the wake of the 2015 refugee “crisis” in Europe. In addition, Rhoumour is also interested in the socio-political dynamics underlying the gold rush that has been taking place in northern Niger since 2014.
Mamadou Cissé Email	Mamadou Cissé was a visiting scholar with the Sahel Research Group in 2015. He holds a doctorate in linguistics from the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris, a master’s degree in English and a bachelor’s degree in French as a Foreign Language. He also holds master’s degrees in international relations and in classical Arabic from INALCO. As a translator and interpreter, he revived the teaching of Wolof at INALCO. After a decade spent in Paris, Mamadou Cissé held posts in Japan and Niger before settling in Dakar, Senegal, where he teaches at the University of Cheikh Anta Diop. His most recent work focuses on general linguistics, lexicology, terminology and linguistic arrangements in Africa, as well as on the writing of African languages in the Arabic script (Ajami). He has written and co-authored several books, including Wolof Proverbs and Dictions (Présence africaine, 2014), and the Wolof translation of The French Language Worldwide (IOF, 2014).
Awa Doucoure Email	Awa Doucoure is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Gaston Berger University in Senegal. She is also teaching assistant at the Virtual University of Senegal. She was a World Bank Robert S. McNamara scholarships visiting fellow for a research stay in African Studies Center and Sahel Research Group, with Professor Villalon, from April 2017 to January 2018. Her research interests are definition and implementation of public policies. For her dissertation, she is focusing on public policy reform in Higher education initiated by the Senegalese government which aims to develop its human capital in order to provide quality human resources capable of having a direct influence on national productivity.
Azizou A. Garba Email	Azizou Abdoul Garba is Deputy Director of Niger’s National Center for Strategic and Security Studies (CNESS). Azizou received his B.A. in Political Science from Ahmadu Bello University of Zaria, Nigeria. He holds an M.A from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. Azizou is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Centre for International Crisis and Conflict Studies (CECRI) at UC Louvain. His research focuses on the effects of terrorism on state building in the Sahel. Azizou was a Technical Advisor to Niger's Ministry of Affairs from 2013 to 2016 and an independent consultant on issues of political governance and civil society participation in state management. He is a founding member of the Casablanca Club and the African Research Center on Global Challenges (ARCC).
Ladiba Gondeu Email	Ladiba Gondeu is a Chadian social anthropologist specializing in civil society, religious dynamics, and project planning and analysis. He is also very active in the Chadian Peace and Reconciliation Initiative. From 2008-2012 he taught in the Sociology department at the University of N'Djamena. In the Spring 2013 semester he was a visiting scholar at the University of Florida, hosted by the Sahel Research Group as part of the Minerva Initiative project. He is the author of L’émergence des organisations islamiques au Tchad. Enjeux, acteurs et territoires published by L’Harmattan in 2011. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Neuchâtel.
Jean Alain Goudiaby Email- Personal website	Jean Alain Goudiaby is a sociologist and professor at the Université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor (Senegal). His research interests focus around higher education policy in Africa, academic mobility, university governance, and pedagogy. He is the author of L’université et la recherche au Sénégal à la croisée des chemins, published by Academia-L'Harmattan, 2014. He is a member of the Réseau d'Etude sur l'Enseignement Supérieur (RESUP), the Association pour la Recherche sur l’Education et les Savoirs (ARES), and projet DEMOSTAF. He currently serves as Director of Pedagogy and of University Reform, as well as a member of the Laboratory on Economic and Social Sciences at the Université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor. He was a visiting scholar at the University of Florida and the Sahel Research Group from March to April 2016.
Fatoumata ("Kiné") Hane Email	Fatoumata (“Kiné”) Hane is a social anthropologist with a specialization in health and medical anthropology. She received a Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in 2007. She was a visiting scholar with the UF Sahel Research Group in September 2013 and returned for the second time in September 2015. She is currently the head of the department of Sociology at the University of Zinguinchor in Senegal, where she works primarily on questions of gender-based violence in conflict settings in Africa. She has carried out a number or research projects in public health policies and governance notably related to tuberculosis and HIV infection in Senegal. She is also the director of a research group on civil governance (LAREG : Laboratoire de recherche et d’études sur la gouvernance), the Senegalese section of Transparency International.
Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem Email	Zekeria Ould Ahmed Salem is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. Prior to joining Northwestern, he was Professor of Political Science at the University of Nouakchott, Mauritania. He is also Research Associate at the Centre d’études et de recherche internationales-Sciences-Po. He earned his Ph.D. from the Université de Lyon, France in 1996. For 2005-2007, he served as General Secretary respectively at The Ministry of Higher Education, and The Ministry of Rural Development in Mauritania. In 2010-2011, he was the very first Mauritanian scholar to be granted the U.S. Fulbright Program Senior Scholar Fellowship to the University of Florida, where he was affiliated with the Sahel Research Group. Subsequently, he was granted two research fellowships respectively at the Paris Institute of Advanced Study and the Nantes Institute of Advanced Study. His research interests are in politics, religion and social transformation with a special focus on Mauritania and North Africa.
Bakary Sambe Email	Bakary Sambe is an Assistant Professor in the Center for Religious Studies of the Université Gaston Berger in Saint-Louis, Senegal, where he also serves as Coordinator of the “Observatory on Religious Radicalism and Conflict in Africa.” He was a visiting scholar with the Sahel Research Group in March and April 2014. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Relations from the Institute of Political Studies of the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and a Masters degree in Arabic Languages and Civilizations. He has been a visiting scholar at The Institute of African Studies (Mohammed V University, Morocco) and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations (ISMC) of the Aga Khan University, London. Dr. Sambe is the author of numerous publications on relations between Arab North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, and on religious dynamics in the Muslim Sahel. He has published a report entitled "Overview of religious radicalism and the terrorist threat in Senegal". Dr. Sambe is a native speaker of Wolof, fluent in French, Classical Arabic, Maghrebian and Levantine Arabic dialects, and good English.
Antoinette Tidjani Alou Email	Antoinette Tidjani-Alou is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at the Université Abdou Moumouni in Niamey, Niger, where she is also member of a research group on “Literature, Gender and Development.” In 2011-2012, she was a senior Fulbright fellow in the Center for African Studies, University of Florida, where she was affiliated with the Sahel Research Group. She has published widely on issues of culture and gender in the Sahel, and has served as president of the International Society for the Oral Literatures of Africa.
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