I attended Makerere University, Kampala where I read political science and Philiosophy, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, India, and Northwestern University. At Northwestern, I worked with William Reno, former Director of the Program of African Studies and current department chair of political science and James Mahoney, Chair of the sociology department. These two co-chaired my PhD committee. I couldn’t have asked for better.
I graduated from Northwestern in 2016 and was appointed Adjunct Lecturer. In August 2017, I moved to North Carolina State University where I got early tenure in 2022.
At Makerere
I read philosophy and political science, graduating with honors in 2005, and did a Master’s in Human Rights graduating in 2007. As an undergrad, after reading Hans Morgenthau I developed a deep interest in the study of states and power, and the dynamics of global politics and economics. It is this interest that led me into an early focus on understanding the post-independent African political crisis as a crisis of the state. My first journal article, “The Making of the Informal State in Uganda” was a culmination of that initial interest in understanding the problematic of the African state.
At CSSSC and NU
I joined the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) in August 2008 as a predoctoral fellow funded by the Netherlands based South-South Exchange Program for Research on the History of Development (Sephis). The intellectual atmosphere at the CSSSC was ecclectic and interdisciplinary. CSSSC was the birth place of subaltern studies and home to a long list of eminent and distinguished Indian scholars. The one year I spent at CSSSC left an indelible mark on my intellectual career. The pre-doctoral training program there offered me the most thoroughgoing and broad introduction to the major theoretical, conceptual, and methodological debates in social science research, across the major disciplines of anthropology, cultural studies, economics, political science, and sociology. My mentor and supervisor at CSSSC was the renowned Indian scholar, Patha Chatterjee. CSSSC provided the bridge that led me to graduate school at Northwestern.