Zoe Samudzi

Zoé Samudzi holds a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco and a MSc in Health, Community and Development from the London School of Economics. She is a research associate at the Center for the Study of Race, Gender and Class at the University of Johannesburg.

Samudzi’s research engages German coloniality, the Ovaherero and Nama genocide and its afterlives, and political memory. Other topics of research interest and consideration include genocide studies more broadly, race-making and visuality, the ethics of seeing/witnessing, biomedicalization and ancestry, the repatriation of art and human remains, and the spatialities of race and violence. In teaching, she is especially interested in exploring visuality in ways that engage specifically with the political histories of photographic images.

Additionally, Samudzi is a writer and critic whose work has appeared in Artforum, Bookforum, The New Republic, Art in America, The New Inquiry, The Architecture Review, SSENSE and elsewhere. She is an associate editor with Parapraxis Magazine, has both written and guest edited for The Funambulist Magazine, is a contributing writer for Jewish Currents and the coauthor of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018).