Okwui Enwezor Postdoctoral Fellow
Surafel Wondimu Abebe studied Literature (BA) and Cultural Studies (MA) at Addis Ababa University (AAU) (2010). He served at AAU as a Lecturer, Researcher, and Deputy Dean of Humanities. He continued working with AAU as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Center for African Studies, and College of Performing and Visual Arts after he completed his Ph.D. in Performance Historiography at the University of Minnesota (2018). He is also a board member of AGITATE, a multi-genre online journal, at the University of Minnesota.
Abebe uses academia, performance, and media as sites of cultural politics from which to interrogate representational practices. Abebe engages with sedimented embodied historiographies to understand what it means to be “human” in the here and now.
As the 2019 Okwui Enwezor Postdoctoral Fellow at The Africa Institute, Abebe will work on his book project, which studies how Ethiopian female performers maneuver and reinvent spaces of empires, revolutions, and neoliberal globalization.
