Africa Initiative

Geri Augusto is a longtime scholar and former activist at the intersection between the politics of knowledge, knowledge practices, creative expression, and struggles for equality and justice in unequal, highly diverse societies and communities. She is a faculty associate at Brown’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), an affiliate in the Africana Studies Department and at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), and a former visiting associate professor of International and Public Affairs and Africana Studies. As a Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Augusto is currently part of the Institute’s Brazil and Africa Initiatives, and she served on the steering committee for Brown’s Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) program up until it became an official concentration. Her recent work spans Brazil, the U.S., and South Africa. In Brazil, she is a member of the scholarly collective Traduzindo no Atlantico Negro (Translating in the Black Atlantic) based at the Federal University of Bahia-UFBA; supervises several post-graduate students in African diasporic literatures, translation studies, and sustainable development; and collaborates with the Salvador-based Steve Biko Cultural and Educational Institute. At the Biko Institute, Augusto helped establish and taught in the Kwetu Leadership Institute for black and women's social movements in the northeast region of Brazil. She is also currently collaborating on a joint University of Johannesburg-Federal University of Bahia project based in both Brazil and South Africa that is supported by a Ministry of Education award from Brazil, and involves student and professor exchanges, and joint research on townships, favelas and other urban areas in both of these Global South countries. She was a recent Letsema Fellow in the Institute of Pan African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the graduate program of critical cultural studies, Pos-Critica, at the State University of Bahia at Alagoinhas.