Dr. Zoé Samudzi is a Provost’s Fellow to Faculty scholar in the Department of African American and Africana Studies and an affiliated faculty in the Department of the History of Art. Her research has been primarily concerned with the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and settler colonialism in southern Africa (and coloniality across the continent more broadly). Her work also contends with genocide memory and registers of denialism; political mythologies of the postcolonial African nation-state and the relationship between ethnicity and the national question; visuality and the ethics of photographic seeing; human remains and the state and community politics around repatriation and restitution; and the spatialities of racecraft and dispossession. She uses curatorial methodologies as a visual-material extension of her research.

An associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, Samudzi is a 2026 Public Parking editorial resident, a 2026 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant grantee for her project, “The Citizen and the Anthropophage: Postwar/Postcolonial Italian Memory and the Cannibal Boom,” a 2026 resident at La Becque’s Principal Residency Program, and an awardee of the 2026 Fire Station Studios' International Curator Residency.

Selected peer-review publications: 

“The Decolonial Contradiction: German Proscription and the Necessities of Refusal.” ARTMargins, 2026.

“Echolalias of Famine: Gaza After Biafra.” Journal of Genocide Studies, 2025

“Paradox of Recognition: Genocide and Colonialism.” Postmodern Culture, 2021.

“Looting the Archive: German Genocide and Incarcerated Skulls,” Social Sciences and Health, 2021.