Rate My Professor Christine Saidi

Dr. Saidi's research centers on gender, authority, identity, and matrilineality in early East-Central African history. Notable publications include Women's Authority and Society in Early East-Central Africa (University of Rochester Press, 2010); Bantu Africa (Oxford University Press, 2017, co-authored with R. Gonzales and C. Fourshey); "Gender, Authority, and Identity in African History" in The Palgrave Handbook of African Women's Studies (Palgrave, 2019); "Women in Precolonial Africa" in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford University Press, 2020); and forthcoming Beyond Gender in Early African History (Cambridge University Press, with R. Gonzales and C. Fourshey). She has secured significant grants, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative grant for "Expressions and Transformations of Gender, Family, and Status in Eastern and Central Africa, 500-1800 CE" (2016-2019), an NEH Summer Seminar on Development Ethics (2015), and a 2021 Pennsylvania Open Education Resources grant for the "Ufahamu" Africana resource database. Dr. Saidi received the 2024 Chambliss Faculty Research Award, the 2025 Faculty Mentorship Award, and will host the Fall 2025 Chambliss Faculty Lecture. Her work contributes to understanding non-binary gender roles and women's authority in precolonial Africa.