Students (left to right): Zachary Enumah, Alex Bowles, Klara Wojkowska, Justin Scott, Camille Davidson, Damilola Oladeru, Nyasha Karimakwenda

Class of 2013

Camille Raquel Davidson graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with honors in 2010 after studying Political Science, Africana Studies, and African languages (Swahili and Xhosa). While in Pittsburgh, Camille took her knowledge of African studies to juvenile detention centers, inner city after school programs, and women’s shelters in the area. In 2009, Camille lived in Cape Town, South Africa, where she worked for the South African Education Project, teaching an after-school English class in Samora Michel Township. In addition, while studying at the University of Cape Town, she did research on the exploitative nature of cultural tourism in South Africa. Camille was recently elected to the executive board of Emasithandane Children’s Home in South Africa, where she likes to spend most of her time when abroad. She was able to take over 200 sweaters to the home this past March after successful clothing drives in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. During the summer of 2010, Camille lived in Mombasa, Kenya, where she studied intermediate Swahili with Yale. In her free time, she shadowed a local Kenyan lawyer and sat in on various court cases in Mombasa. This upcoming year, Camille will study Zulu, hoping to use her new language skills to further communicate and conduct research in South African townships.

Justin Scott graduated from Georgetown University in 2010 with a BA in English and a certificate in African studies. The summer after his sophomore year, he taught English in a primary school in Mauritius, sparking a broad interest in African affairs. Returning to school, he focused primarily on the nexus of political, developmental, and environmental realities across the continent, researching gas flaring in the Niger delta and writing his thesis on food security, the politics of famine, and the threat of climate change in Ethiopia. Somewhere along the way, he developed a fascination with West African music, a fascination that led to many late nights poring over blogs, looking for the next potentially life-changing obscure release. Immediately following graduation, he embarked on a month-long backpacking trip through Ghana, where his homestays taught him the limitations of European languages and prompted him to look closer at connections between cultural norms and development. At Yale, Justin will continue to research the nexus of political, developmental, and environmental concerns in West Africa, with a focus on climate change adaptation in the smallholder agriculture sector.

Klara Wojtkowska graduated Magna cum Laude from Rice University with a B.A. in English Literature and B.M. in Violin Performance.  A citizen of both Poland and the United States, her undergraduate thesis focused on contemporary Polish theater.  She has written several plays, one of which was staged at Rice University in 2008.  A more recent play was staged in part at the ARSHARTER Theater institute in Krakow.  After graduating from Rice, Klara went on to travel the world as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow - though she initially focused on Performance and Polish immigrants abroad, she switched her focus to Performance and Conflict Reconciliation in Southern Africa.  Following the Watson fellowship, Klara went on to live in Kraków, where she worked as a club violinist, a journalist for glimpse.org, an English teacher, and studied playwriting with Andrzej Sadowski at the ARSHARTER Theater Institute. She has published poetry, as well as some articles in various publications - including dwukropek, a Polish magazine in South Africa. At Yale, Klara will focus on performance, immigration and conflict reconciliation in Southern Africa - she is very excited to continue combining her academic and creative work.

Class of 2014

Helinna Ayalew graduated from Macalester College with a BA in International Studies, focusing on Political Science and African Studies. Having grown up both in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Washington D.C., she had always known her academic and professional interests were never far from the African continent. While an undergraduate she studied abroad for a year, first in Cape Town, South Africa then Maastricht, the Netherlands, undertaking and eventually publishing research on globalization and leadership in multicultural societies. It was while on this year abroad that her interest in conflict studies was sparked. After graduating she moved back to Addis Ababa to work in this field, completing internships at the Intergovernmental Authority on Development and at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and had the opportunity to work for an American public health NGO. Various assignments took her to several corners of the country and the wider Horn of Africa region, including some of the conflict-riddled border zones. Her work facilitated a greater understanding of on-the-ground concerns while exposing her to different perspectives on peace and conflict from across the region.  At Yale, Helinna intends to continue exploring the nexus between conflict and development in the Horn of Africa, focusing particularly on ethnic and environmentally driven conflicts, as well as the role of leadership.

Erdong Chen did his undergraduate studies at American University, where he double majored in International Relations and Business Administration. He was born in Nanjing, China and went to Washington DC for college at the age of eighteen. He has traveled widely and has conducted research in many fascinating locations, including North Korea, Cuba and South Sudan. As an undergraduate his research focused on Washington-Beijing-Taipei triangular dynamics, nuclear crises in the Korean Peninsula, and civil society development in the Greater China Area. He worked briefly with a political risk analysis firm following his graduation in May, 2011. In the Fall of 2011, he took a research trip to Africa where he focused on strategic interactions and energy gaming between the United States and China in the region. During that trip, he visited South Africa and the newly established South Sudan. He is the first and, thus far, the only Chinese independent scholar to visit South Sudan for in-depth research. He is currently providing investment recommendations from Chinese companies interested in doing business in Africa.

Erdong’s interests include writing, fashion design, and business. He has written extensively for policy journals and newspapers, including the Foreign Policy in Focus, the Hong Kong Journal, the Asian Times Online, the China Post, among others. In 2010 he published his first book, From Washington to Taipei – Observing Taiwan from a Mainland-Chinese Student’s Perspective. The bestseller has received wide attention and generated profound debates across the Taiwan Strait. He has co-founded an education consulting company in China and plans to start a men’s wear boutique soon.

Lila Ann Dodge graduated from Smith College with a BA in Dance and American Studies. At Smith, Lila completed a thesis on site-specific dance comprising a written thesis, theorizing and tracing the history of place-based dance work, paralleled by her own 40-minute, itinerant, site-specific choreography. Her interest in contemporary dance of Africa was sparked particularly during her junior year abroad in France, studying at several Parisian universities and interning at the Centre National de la Danse. Lila received a Fulbright Fellowship for 2009-10, and spent ten months in Burkina Faso researching the development of communities around “contemporary” dance practice, as they loop between tight local systems of training and creative production in Africa, and highly international circuits of performance, collaboration, funding and accompanying political dynamics.
Lila has most recently been living in San Francisco, where, among other projects, she was performing and assisting on the administrative team for Kiandanda Dance Theater, directed by Byb Chanel Bibene (Republic of Congo/USA). At Yale, Lila aims both to continue the line of research she began in Burkina Faso, and to investigate her attention to movement and somatic experience as a lens for examining social phenomena beyond the purview of dance.

Denise Lim graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 2008 with a B.A. in both English and sociology and a minor in Africana studies. After her second year of undergraduate study she received a grant from the Bryn Mawr Department of Sociology to work with a foreign NGO called World Camp for Kids, Inc.  She spent five weeks traveling to rural villages outside of the capital city of Lilongwe, Malawi, where she taught HIV/AIDS prevention education to primary school students throughout the region. She went on to study abroad at the University of Cape Town, where she further developed her social research in HIV/AIDS in South Africa as well as apartheid history and post-apartheid literature. Her senior thesis focused on the political influence of racialized Christian theologies during the apartheid regime and its residual effects on post-apartheid literary discourse. At Yale, Denise plans to continue studying the social, cultural, and intellectual histories of modern South Africa.

Shatreen Masshoor graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in African Studies in 2012. As an undergrad, she was a Global Health Fellow, and her African studies focused on medical anthropology, particularly in relation to women’s reproductive health and development. Shatreen’s senior thesis was based on research she gathered during work with the Liberian Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, on the building of maternity waiting homes in Monrovia, Liberia. Her thesis examined the continuation of these kinds of projects as part of the “anti-politics machine” of development. Shatreen plans to continue examining women’s health, specifically in the area of conflict and post-conflict regions and sexual violence. Her main regions of interest are Swahili-speaking areas of Central and Eastern Africa. Having studied advanced Swahili in Mombasa, Kenya, she will assist the elementary Swahili class at Yale as a Teaching Fellow, and will begin her fourth year of study in Swahili, to add on to her proficiencies in French and Dari. Locally, Shatreen works as a Sexual Assault Crisis Counselor with the Milford Rape Crisis Center.

Catherine Nelson is a writer, researcher and editor in international affairs with a focus on Africa. She holds 12 years of experience across several regions, including East Africa, the Andes, and the Baltic states. She has returned most recently from the Great Lakes Region of Africa where she conducted conflict and justice research on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) in Rwanda and Burundi. She specializes in alternative dispute resolution, human rights, gender, and peacekeeping and the rule of law. Earlier research focused on forced migration and land rights, and Catherine received an MA in Migration Studies from the Brussels School of International Studies, University of Kent (2009).

Scott Ross graduated from Arizona State University where he triple-majored in Secondary Education, American History, and Global Studies.  As a part of his Global Studies coursework, he volunteered at a number of organizations in Lira, Uganda in 2010.  He also taught high school American History and Government classes full-time as a part of his Education degree.  His interest in African studies centers around the history of how states approach conflict resolution and how the International Criminal Court gets involved in conflicts today.  At Yale, he hopes to concentrate on history and politics to learn more about the interplay between international law and conflicts. He is also interested in non-governmental organizations' work regarding human rights in central Africa. In his free time he enjoys spending too much time on Twitter, playing racquetball, blogging, and spending time with his wife.

Kevin Winn graduated from Emory University in May of 2011 with a BA in African Studies and Middle Eastern Studies. While there, he studied Arabic for three years, which sparked his interest in North Africa. After graduating, Kevin moved to Agadir, Morocco to teach English at an elementary school for a semester. Once returning, he began an internship at The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia where he worked in the Office of Development. While at The Carter Center, Kevin worked closely with staff members to solicit possible donors to The Carter Center’s health and peace programs in Africa and the Middle East. This internship, along with coursework at Emory University, got him interested in focusing on the postcolonial history of Eastern and Southern Africa. As a graduate student, Kevin hopes to broaden his understanding of the Arabic language as well as learn Kiswahili.