Munirat Suleiman (USA/Nigeria)

Hailing from the Atlanta metropolitan area, I graduated magna cum laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in Sociology (Departmental Honours) as well as English & Comparative Literature in May 2024.
 

 

My years spinning webs between the social sciences and the humanities granted me a critical eye for how socio-cultural issues inform bias, how media perpetuates racial bias in specific, and how racial narratives bleed into literary tropes. This scope also challenged me to interject the experiences of Black women if overlooked, as I often noticed a concerning underrepresentation of Black feminist perspectives when analysing race in my undergraduate coursework and in my experiences within activist spaces. My dedication to analysing race and gender simultaneously drove me to centre my sociological senior thesis on gender-based marginalisation within the Black Lives Matter movement using qualitative methodology. That dedication then drove me through a year-long research project in Berlin focusing on transnational Black feminist solidarity networks between the United States and Germany. This research was supported by the inaugural Fulbright-John Lewis Civil Rights Fellowship.
 

 

After my time in Berlin, I now come to Oxford to further my humanities education through an MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. I specifically intend to analyse contemporary literary fiction from Black women writers that positions Black sisterhoods as sites of resistance against misogynoir (the oppressive synthesis of anti-Black racism and misogyny). In doing so, I aim to further interrogate fiction as a historically important tool for Black women, one in which they could imagine, articulate, and experiment with Black feminist philosophies during the rise of the Black Feminist movement. As a Nigerian-American, I am also drawn to diasporic and transnational feminist identities, and I hope to become more familiar with the West African diasporic communities in the UK over the next year.
 

 

Beyond being steeped in my academic pursuits, you can also find me collecting anything from dried flowers to receipts for my journals, exploring local parks, hunting down a good almond croissant, or writing casually passionate emails to my long distance loved ones. I’m delighted to both contribute and learn from an inspiring community of scholars over the next year in Ertegun House as we exchange insights and stories between our different academic specialties and experiences. I’m also grateful for the Ertegun Scholarship’s support in helping me advance academic and cultural discourses that understand Black feminism not only as a socio-political movement, but also as a literary, historical, and philosophical tradition.