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About Sara Katz

Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Her research examines the history of the Nigerian hajj in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Her interests include Muslim-Christian relations, visual culture, and global Islam.

Sara Katz is a postdoctoral associate in the history department at Duke University. Her research examines the history of the Nigerian hajj in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Her interests include Muslim-Christian relations, visual culture, and global Islam.

NBN Episodes hosted by Sara:

African Studies May 20, 2023

Touts

Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea

Enrique Martino

Hosted by Sara Katz
Touts: Recruiting Indentured Labor in the Gulf of Guinea (de Gruyter, 2022) is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea …
African Studies November 22, 2022

African Ecomedia

Network Forms, Planetary Politics

Cajetan Iheka

Hosted by Sara Katz
In African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), Cajetan Iheka examines the ecological footprint of media in Africa alongside the representation of environmental issues in visual culture. Iheka …
African Studies October 10, 2022

Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa

The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria

Saheed Aderinto

Hosted by Sara Katz
With this multispecies study of animals as instrumentalities of the colonial state in Nigeria, Saheed Aderinto argues that animals, like humans, were colonial subjects in Africa. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood …
African Studies August 17, 2022

From Rebels to Rulers

Writing Legitimacy in the Early Sokoto State

Paul Naylor

Hosted by Sara Katz
Sokoto was the largest and longest lasting of West Africa's nineteenth-century Muslim empires. Its intellectual and political elite left behind a vast written record, including over 300 Arabic texts authored …
African Studies June 21, 2022

Shari'a, Inshallah

Finding God in Somali Legal Politics

Mark Fathi Massoud

Hosted by Sara Katz
Western analysts have long denigrated Islamic states as antagonistic, even antithetical, to the rule of law. Mark Fathi Massoud tells a different story: for nearly 150 years, the Somali people …
African Studies June 21, 2022

Emirs in London

Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity

Moses E. Ochonu

Hosted by Sara Katz
Emirs in London: Subalteran Travel and Nigeria's Modernity (Indiana UP, 2022) recounts how Northern Nigerian Muslim aristocrats who traveled to Britain between 1920 and Nigerian independence in 1960 relayed that experience …
African Studies April 29, 2022

An Uneasy Embrace

Africa, India and the Spectre of Race

Shobana Shankar

Hosted by Sara Katz
The entwined histories of Blacks and Indians defy easy explanation. From Ghanaian protests over Gandhi statues to American Vice President Kamala Harris’s story, this relationship—notwithstanding moments of common struggle—seethes with …
African Studies March 8, 2022

Singing Yoruba Christianity

Music, Media, and Morality

Vicki L. Brennan

Hosted by Sara Katz
Singing the same song is a central part of the worship practice for members for the Cherubim and Seraphim Christian Church in Lagos, Nigeria. Vicki L. Brennan reveals that by …
African Studies February 28, 2022

Imaging Culture

Photography in Mali, West Africa

Candace M. Keller

Hosted by Sara Katz
Imaging Culture: Photography in Mali, West Africa (Indiana University Press, 2021) is a sociohistorical study of the meaning, function, and aesthetic significance of photography in Mali, West Africa, from the 1930s to the …
African Studies February 22, 2022

Fine Boys

A Novel

Eghosa Imasuen

Hosted by Sara Katz
In Fine Boys: A Novel (Ohio University Press, 2021), Ewaen is a Nigerian teenager, bored at home in Warri and eager to flee from his parents’ unhappy marriage and incessant quarreling. When …
African Studies December 29, 2021

Making the World Global

U.S. Universities and the Production of the Global Imaginary

Isaac A. Kamola

Hosted by Sara Katz
Following World War II the American government and philanthropic foundations fundamentally remade American universities into sites for producing knowledge about the world as a collection of distinct nation-states. As neoliberal …
African Studies December 14, 2021

Indirect Subjects

Nollywood's Local Address

Matthew H. Brown

Hosted by Sara Katz
In Indirect Subjects: Nollywood's Local Address (Duke UP, 2021), Matthew H. Brown analyzes the content of the prolific Nigerian film industry's mostly direct-to-video movies alongside local practices of production and …
African Studies December 6, 2021

Filtering Histories

The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times

Drew A. Thompson

Hosted by Sara Katz
Photographers and their images were critical to the making of Mozambique, first as a colony of Portugal and then as independent nation at war with apartheid in South Africa. When …
African Studies October 27, 2021

What Britain Did to Nigeria

A Short History of Conquest and Rule

Max Siollun

Hosted by Sara Katz
In this ambitious book, Max Siollun provides an overview of Nigerian history from 1472 to the 1950s. As such, What Britain Did to Nigeria: A Short History of Conquest and …
African Studies October 21, 2021

The Muridiyya on the Move

Islam, Migration, and Place Making

Cheikh Anta Babou

Hosted by Sara Katz
The construction of collective identity among the Muridiyya abroad is a communal but contested endeavor. Differing conceptions of what should be the mission of Muridiyya institutions in the diaspora reveal …
African Studies October 19, 2021

Global Nomads

An Ethnography of Migration, Islam, and Politics

Susanna Fioratta

Hosted by Sara Katz
Countering the traditional narrative of "migration as crisis," Global Nomads tells the story of a group of people for whom migration is not a symptom of a disordered world, but …
African Studies September 22, 2021

Pentecostal Republic

Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria

Ebenezer Obadare

Hosted by Sara Katz
Throughout its history, Nigeria has been plagued by religious divisions. Tensions have only intensified since the restoration of democracy in 1999, with the divide between Christian south and Muslim north …