Dr. Jemima Pierre is Distinguished Faculty of Arts Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies in the Institute of Race, Gender, Sexuality and Social Justice (GRSJ), and Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She is also a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg.
Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist in the African Diaspora Program at the University of Texas, Austin, her research and teaching engages with Africa and the African diaspora across three broad areas of inquiry: 1) the relationship of political economy to race, as articulated through capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism; 2) migration, transnationalism, and diaspora; and 3) the ethics and politics of western knowledge production and disciplinary formation.
Dr. Pierre has published widely; her essays and articles have examined the racial history of the discipline of anthropology, race and colonialism, theories of the African diaspora, the cultural politics of racial formation in Africa, Western resource extraction in Africa, and the history and politics of U.S. imperialism in Haiti and the Caribbean. She is also the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. The Predicament of Blackness was winner of the 2014 Elliot Skinner Book Award in Africanist Anthropology and long listed for the 2013 OCM – BOCAS Literary Prize. Her next book, titled Of Natives, Ethnics, and True Negroes: A Counter-History of Anthropology, will be published in 2025.
Born in Gros Morne, Haiti and raised in Miami, Florida. Dr. Pierre joins UBC from Los Angeles, California.