SSRC

Amina Mama is currently the director of the Women and Gender Studies program at UC Davis. Professor Mama was the first Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College in Oakland, California. She previously held fulltime positions at academic institutions in the Netherlands (The Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, from 1989-1991), Britain (The Development and Project Planning Centre at the University of Bradford) and South Africa, where she served for ten years as the Chair in Gender Studies at the University of Cape Town's African Gender Institute. Whilst at the University of Cape Town she initiated the flagship graduate program in Gender Studies and led a series of continent-wide research, curriculum development and publication projects. Amina Mama serves as the founding editor of Africa's first continental feminist scholarly journal 'Feminist Africa'. She currently chairs the Board of Directors of the Global Fund for Women, and serves on the United Nations Committee for Development Policy, the Development Policy Council of Sweden, and the Board of Directors of the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana.

Amina Mama's interests are feminist theory, activist research methodologies, women's movements, international development studies, militarism, social transformation, organisational development and change and politics of knowledge. She has led and conducted gender research in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and South Africa. She is currently working with colleagues to develop a transnational feminist project on militarism, conflict and women's activism.