Adom Getachew

Faculty Associate
Political Science and the College
University of Chicago
Email: [email protected]
Website: Personal / faculty page
Biography
Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. Her first book, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, reconstructs an account of self-determination offered in the political thought of Black Atlantic anticolonial nationalists during the height of decolonization in the twentieth century.
Adom holds a joint PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University. She is on the faculty board of the Pozen Center for Human Rights, a fellow at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and a faculty affiliate at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.
Selected publications
- Book · 2019 Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination Princeton University Press How anticolonial thinkers such as Azikiwe, Du Bois, Nkrumah, Manley and Nyerere sought to remake the international order, not just build nations.
- Article · 2026 Making The Post-Colonial World New Left Review
- Article · 2023 Three Approaches to the Study of Race and International Relations Security Studies
- Article · 2023 “The Present as History”: Walter Rodney and the Search for Usable African Pasts Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism Reads Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa for how the historian joins past, present and political struggle.
- Article · 2022 From the Boundaries of the People to their Enactment: A New Terrain for Democratic Theory Democratic Theory
Links go to the publisher's page. See all AGPT scholars' work in the Scholars' library.
Talks
Seminar · April 2022
Africa for the Africans: A history of a Pan-African slogan
Adom Getachew (University of Chicago) presents her paper. Co-sponsored by the Harvard Sociology Workshop in History, Culture, and Society.