Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen

Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen is a Lecturer in African Studies and Middle East Studies and faculty affiliate in Anthropology. Her work focuses on the geopolitics and economics of race, especially as they relate to mobility and migration. Her first book, under review with Duke University Press, is entitled Bordering Blackness: Migration and Dispossession between Africa and Europe. It comprises an ethnography of the ‘EurAfrican border’ through the experiences of West and Central African migrants encountering it as they travel from their home countries, through Morocco and other northern African states, and across the Mediterranean Sea. The book sheds light on and theorizes the racial and economic logics that stabilize this border regime across various geographies, actors, and interests and historicizes these logics in the longue durée of African captivity and racial othering. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and Fulbright-Hays and has appeared in The Journal of North African Studies, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, ACME: A Journal of Critical Geography, Geoforum, and Tumultes (Université Paris 7). Her next project, tentatively titled Geography of Guns: From New Haven to Natal Colony, will trace the history and afterlives of U.S. gun manufacturing in settler colonial and imperial projects in north America, southern Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Partnering with community groups and using archival and ethnographic methods, the project will examine how weapons have circulated across continents and within communities over the past 150 years and map the political and ecological impacts that endure in the present.

Courses offered

• Race, Space and Power; Introduction to Critical Border Studies; Infrastructures of Empire;
• What is the Global South? Africa in the World; Migration & Transnationalism in Muslim
• Worlds; African Migration and Diasporas; Comparative Settler Geographies