Madina Thiam Receives Penny Kanner Dissertation Research Fellowship

Madina Thiam, 5th year PhD candidate in the Africa field, has received the Penny Canner Dissertation Research Fellowship from the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. The Penny Kanner Research Fellowship funds exceptional dissertation research projects that pertain to women or gender that use historical materials and methods.

Thiam’s dissertation investigates the mobilities and freedom strategies of itinerant Muslim figures from present-day Mali. It draws on archival and oral research conducted in Mali, Senegal, France, England, Ireland, and Jamaica. She also helps coordinate the Bamako-based Projet Archives des Femmes, an archival initiative that preserves endangered documents belonging to Malian women who undertook anti-colonial struggles in the 1950s and women’s rights activism in the decades that followed.