I study the history of Muslim communities in Mali and West Africa from the 18th through the first half of the 20th century. My first book manuscript, Navel of the World: an Intimate History of Muslim West Africa, moves across West Africa, the Atlantic ocean, and the Sahara desert, to offer a novel account of changing landscapes of slavery and empire in the modern world, told from the vantage point of African Muslims from the Sahel region.

From the late 18th century through the 1960s, the Sahel underwent major shifts stemming from the gradual end of Atlantic slavery, the trans-Saharan trade in goods and people, West African Islamic revolutions, and European colonialism. During that time, Sahelian Muslims' circulations and networks of exchange spanned the lands tucked between the Volta, Niger and Senegal rivers, but also the expanse between the Caribbean and Red seas. I seek to understand the social, economic and political worlds they navigated and shaped, through a focus on their mobilities and intimate lives.

Focusing on individuals who lived in, and circulated through, the Sahel’s Inland Delta region, Navel of the World explores the way their families and intimate relationships were forged, broken, and remade in the furnace of these deep social and geopolitical reconfigurations. I approach those relationships as sites of encounter of intersecting histories, including that of Islam in Africa, slavery and capitalism in the Atlantic world, and decolonization in the French empire.

I have received multiple prizes and awards to support this work, including from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Historical Association. Among other venues, my writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of African History, the Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’ Afrique, and History in Africa.

In parallel to my research, I sit on the editorial board of the Journal of West African History, and international correspondants committee of the Annales. I also serve as co-director of the Projet Archives des Femmes, a collective that preserves the histories of Malian women’s anti-colonial and feminist struggles, and organizes a summer school in Bamako. I regularly engage public audiences and contribute to international media, including Libération, where I write a column on the Sahel.

I received my PhD in African History from UCLA in 2022. In 2024, I was a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and delivered the 7th William Allen Brown memorial lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, I was the James Weldon Johnson Assistant Professor of History at New York University from 2022 to 2025.

Spring 2026
AS.100.225 Mansa Musa’s Gold: The History of African Muslims (undergraduate)
AS.100.611 Trade and Capitalism in African History (graduate)

Articles

“The Century’s Firstborn: Intimate History in the Aftermath of Nineteenth-Century Islamic Revolutions in Central Mali,” History in Africa, forthcoming.

with Devon Golaszewski, Moussa Beïdy Tamboura, Oumou Sidibé, and Gregory Mann, "Le Projet Archives des Femmes du Mali: archiver, numériser et diffuser les luttes des femmes maliennes," Revue d'Histoire Contemporaine de l'Afrique (2023): 1-13.

“The Caliphate, the Black Writer, and a World in Revolution, 1957-1969.” Journal of African History, vol. 64, no. 2 (2023): 174-183.

“Women in Mali.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2020): 1-35.

with Gregory Mann. “The History of Mali: Connectivity and State Formation since the 18th Century.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2020): 1-27.

Essays and Chapters

Thiam, Madina. “Segu and its Wake: Authority, Legitimacy and Narratives of Power in Mali’s History,” Journal of African History, vol. 65, no. 3 (2025): 452-458.

“Historienne, militante, et députée du Mali,” three-parts essay,  Afrique XXI, 2024

“Connecting the Two Sudans: Mobile Histories of Faith, Cotton, and Colonialism,” POMEPS Studies no. 52 (2024): Race Politics and Colonial Legacies: France, Africa and the Middle East.

“Fuir du Mali à la Mecque.” In Colonisations: Notre histoire, edited by Pierre Singaravélou, Arthur Asseraf, Guillaume Blanc, Yala Kisukidi, and Mélanie Lamotte, 527-528. Paris: Le Seuil, 2023.

with Yatta Kiazolu. “Mabel Dove and Aoua Keita: Feminist and Internationalist Struggles from Ghana to Mali.” In She Who Struggles: Revolutionary Women Who Shaped The World, edited by Marral Shamshiri-Fard and Sorcha Amy MacGregor Thomson, 34-49. London: Pluto Press, 2023.

“Struggle, Neglect and Archives,” CODESRIA Bulletin no. 5&6, Special Issue on the Crisis in Mali and in the Sahel Region, edited by Amy Niang (2020): 21-23."Nicholas Said, étonnant voyageur." In Sahara, mondes connectés, edited by Sophie Caratini, Charles Grémont, Céline Lesourd and Olivier Schinz, 75-79. Paris: Gallimard, 2019.