Welcome to Dr Tendai Mangena as British Academy Global Professor

We are delighted to welcome Dr Tendai Mangena to the University of Leeds. On 1 February 2023, Dr Mangena is taking up a four-year Global Professorship position, awarded to her by the British Academy.

Dr Mangena will be working on a project titled “Uncoupling Heteropatriarchy in African Feminism”. Using the experiences of unmarried Shona women of Zimbabwe as represented in indigenous knowledges and in their biographies, the project will explore the decolonial implications of such representations for African feminism. She will be affiliated with the Leeds University Centre for African Studies, and with the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science.

Dr Mangena is currently Associate Professor of African Literary and Cultural Studies at Great Zimbabwe University in Masvingo, and Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She received her PhD in 2015 from Leiden University. Since then, she held an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Bremen University and a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship at the University of California, Riverside.

Dr Mangena said: “I feel greatly honoured and also overwhelmed to have been selected as one of the eight recipients of the Global Professorship award in 2022.”

“The Professorship will offer me a great opportunity to collaborate and set an innovative research agenda of promoting the emerging field of ‘single studies’ as a critical sub-field of gender studies in Africa.”

“I am very excited and look forward to joining the internationally renowned Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) and to working closely with colleagues at LUCAS, as well as with my host professor, Adriaan van Klinken, whose passion for the development of African studies is both unwavering and inspiring.”