Daniel Agbiboa

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also serves as Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Affiliate Faculty of the Bloomberg Center for Cities and Co-Chair of the Urban Conversation Series in the Mahindra Humanities Center. He is also an Executive Committee Member of the Harvard Center for African Studies (CAS) and an Advisory Board Member of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. He was previously Assistant Professor of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University and Perry World House Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a DPhil (PhD) from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), where he was a Queen Elizabeth House Scholar, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (Magdalene College), as a Cecil Renaud Scholar.

Professor Agbiboa’s research focuses on the intersection of violence and order, urban governance, mobility and mobilisation, environmental politics, empire and African subjectivity. His works are grounded in discourse analysis, mobile ethnography, and a critical ethnography of the state. He is the author of “They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria” (Oxford University Press, 2022) and “Mobility, Mobilization and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context”; editor of “Transport, Transgression and Politics in African Cities: The Rhythm of Chaos” (Routledge, 2019); and co-editor of “People, Predicaments and Potentials in Africa” (Langaa RPCIG).

Professor Agbiboa is the recipient of several prestigious (book and article) awards, including the Lee Ann Fujii Book Award given by the International Studies Association (ISA); the ISA Peace Best Book Award; finalist for both the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) Best Book Prize and the Global Development Studies (GDS) Best Book Award; the Politics and Gender Best Article Award given by editors of Politics and Gender journal (published by Cambridge University Press) and the Women, Gender and Politics Section of APSA; and the 2023 James F. Short Jr. Distinguished Article Award (Honourable Mention) given by the Crime, Law and Deviance Section of the American Sociological Association.

In 2023, Professor Agbiboa received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award, given by the Urban and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) for his significant contributions to the study of urban politics. He has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, recipient of the Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award, and holder of the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award (2024-2026). He currently serves on the Editorial Board of the African Studies Review and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, where he also serves as a Trustee.

Professor Agbiboa’s research has been supported by the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, the Motsepe Presidential Accelerator Fund for Africa, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Study, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the United Nations Development Program, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Research Fund Award, among others.