Anaïs Angelo

Anaïs Angelo is a French scholar currently based at the Department of African Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. She graduated in political sciences (Sciences Po Paris), specialized in African studies (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) and completed her Ph.D. in history (European University Institute, Florence).

Trained in political science and history, she is particularly interested in African postcolonial political history, focusing on African presidential powers, African women’s postcolonial history, primary sources, biography and autobiography writing.

Main publications

Her first book, Power and the Presidency in Kenya (Cambridge University Press, 2020), tells the history of presidential powers in postcolonial Kenya.

In 2021, she edited a volume on The Politics of Biography in Africa, which shows how biographical narratives can shed light on alternative, little known or under-researched aspects of state power in African politics.

Fellowship & memberships

In 2022, she was awarded an Elise Richter Fellowship (and https://eliserichter.net) to conduct a three-year project exploring another aspect of Kenyan history: the struggles of the first women who campaigned for a parliamentary seat in Kenya, in the 1960s-1970s, a time when politics remained an essentially male field.

Since 2022, Anaïs Angelo is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

See Anaïs Angelo’s curriculum vitae and publications here: