Ousseina Alidou’s biography, fact, career, awards, net worth and life story

Ousseina D. Alidou (born March 29, 1963) is an Africanist scholar specialising in the study of Muslim women in Africa.

Academic background and specialization

She is a professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literature at Rutgers University. She was a member of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and co-edited the widely cited anthology A Thousand Flowers (2000). Her work on Engaging Modernity has also been widely cited.

She travelled to the US from Niger in 1988 to pursue her studies. She received her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington.

Her twin sister Hassana Alidou has been Niger’s ambassador to the United States since February 2015.

Awards

• 2006 Rutgers University Board of Trustees Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence
• 2007 Runner-up, Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association for Engaging Modernity
• 2010 Distinguished Alumni Award of the Africa-America Institute

Publications

• A Thousand Flowers: Social struggles against structural adjustment in African universities co-edited with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis, (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,2000)
• Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005)
• Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, and Social Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013)