Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
Lecturer, Councils of African and Middle East Studies
Division:
Sociocultural
Degree(s):
PhD, Clark University, Geography, 2020; BA/MA University of Texas as Austin
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.
Education
BA in Government, University of Texas at Austin
MA, PhD in Geography, Clark University
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