Wilson Fall is Associate Professor and Program Chair of the African Studies Program at Lafayette College. Wilson-Fall served as Director of the West African Research Center in Dakar from 1999-2004. She earned her Ph.D. from Howard University’s African Studies Center, with a concentration in Social Anthropology, and her M.A. from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria.
Her research engages questions of socio-cultural change among nomadic livestock producers, slavery and unfree labor in Africa and the diaspora, and ethnic identity. Most of her work has been in the Sahel region of West Africa. Publications on pastoralism include “Fulbe of the Dieri and the Ferlo,” in La societe senegalaise entre le local et le global (ed. Momar Coumba Diop), Karthala, 2002, ”Traditional African Conflict Medicine: The Fulbe Example,” in Traditional African Conflict Medicine ( ed. William Zartman), Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, and “The Upward Mobility of Wives: Gender, Class and Ethnicity,” The Journal of African Philosophy, 1999. Recent publications include “Women Merchants and Slave Depots: St. Louis, Senegal and St. Mary’s, Madagascar,” in Slaving Paths: Rebuilding and Rethinking the Atlantic Worlds, (ed., Ana Lucia Araujo), Cambria Press, 2011; and “Life Stories and Ancestor Debts: Creole Malagasy in Eighteenth Century Virginia,” in Crossing Memories: Slavery and the African Diaspora, (eds. Maria Candido, Paul Lovejoy and Ana Lucia Araujo), Africa World Press, 2011. Dr. Wilson-Fall’s most recent publication is Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic (Ohio University Press, 2015). Her new book project focuses on youth among Fulbe pastoralists in Niger and Senegal.