Dr. Zoé Samudzi is a Provost’s Fellow to Faculty scholar in the Department of African-American and Africana Studies. She is a Global Blackness Fellow with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Johannesburg, and a fellow with African Museums and Heritage Restitution (AFRIMUHERE). Her research has been primarily concerned with the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and settler colonialism in southern Africa (and coloniality across the continent more broadly). Her work also contends with genocide memory and registers of denialism; political mythologies of the postcolonial African nation-state and the relationship between ethnicity and the national question; visuality and the ethics of photographic and humanitarian seeing and witnessing; human remains and the state and community politics around repatriation and restitution; and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession. She uses curatorial methodologies as a visual-material extension of her research.

As well as an art critic and writer, Samudzi is an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, a popular magazine dedicated to psychoanalytic thinking.

Selected peer-review publications: 

Samudzi, Zoé. “Paradox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism.” Postmodern Culture, 2021.

Samudzi, Zoé. “Looting the Archive: German Genocide and Incarcerated Skulls,” Social Sciences and Health, 2021.

Please see the attached Curriculum Vitae (CV) below.