Mariam Fofana '27
Mariam Fofana (she/her) is a third-year student at Northwestern University majoring in history, with a regional concentration in the Middle East/Africa, and minoring in cultural anthropology and Chinese. Born in the Bronx to Sierra Leonean immigrant parents, Mariam’s intellectual interests center the afterlives of displacement and the unrecorded labors of West African womanhood. Over the past two summers, she has pursued independent ethnographic research: first investigating how Sierra Leonean sex workers use the Krio language to articulate memory and imagine futurity, and more recently examining how refugee West African women craft homelands and communities in Chicago and New York City. Together, these projects zero in on how belonging is enacted through gendered memory, oral history, and urban spatial practices. Beyond her independent work, Mariam has also researched nightlife and domesticity in colonial Nigeria as part of Northwestern’s Material History Lab, under Professor Akinwumi Ogundiran. Additionally, she has participated in the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program and the Brady Scholars Program in Ethics and Civic Life; she is a recipient of a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship; and she is currently participating in the Leopold Fellowship. In the future, she hopes to pursue a PhD in history, fusing her interests in archaeology, anthropology, African feminisms, and memory-making. Outside of academia, she enjoys sourcing vintage footwear, partaking in the art of embodied movement, talking with shopkeepers in Chinatown, and digital storytelling.