Vivian Lu

Vivian Lu is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Macmillan Center, Council on African Studies. She is a a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on capitalism and diasporic mobilizations amongst the Global South. Vivian received her PhD in anthropology from Stanford University in 2018. Her first book project focuses on the extensive migratory circulations of Nigerian merchants amongst contemporary trade sites across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Drawing from academic genealogies in the anthropology of capitalism, critical race studies, and postcolonial African studies, her work examines how transnational south-south diasporic formations have transformed Nigerian social imaginaries and discourses of postcolonial political and economic sovereignty.