Ousseina D. Alidou is professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures, and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. She directed the Center for African Studies at Rutgers University from 2009 to 2015.
Alidou is a theoretical linguist whose research focuses on women’s agency in African Muslim societies; gendered discourses of citizenship and rights; gender, education, politics and leadership. She is the author of Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Changeand Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger, which was a runner-up for the Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women's Caucus of the Association of African Studies.
She has co-edited numerous books including Writing through the Visual and Virtual in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africawith Ahmed and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities. In addition, she has published over 50 book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA),Comparative Literature,Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East,and Africa Today. Her forthcoming (2019) book is Gender, Islam, Popular Culture and Social Change in the Sahel.
Alidou is the recipient of several national and international scholarly and service awards including: Obafemi Awolowo Center for Gender and Social Policy Studies Distinguished Visiting Scholar Service Award (2015), Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Award (2015), Newark Women-in-the Media Distinguished Community Service Award (2015), Rutgers University 2011 Warren I. Susman Awardfor Excellence in Teaching, Africa America Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award (2010), Ford Foundation Human Rights and Social Justice Grant Award (2005), Rutgers University Board of Trustee’s Scholarly Excellence Award (2005).
Alidou received a master’s degree in linguistics from the Universite Abdou Moumouni in Niger, and a master’s degree in applied linguistics and a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics, both from Indiana University.