Samuel Shearer is assistant professor in the Department of African and African American Studies. Shearer's work focuses on the design, production, and destruction of urban space in African cities and how these processes inform popular politics and cultures across the continent. His current book project, tentatively titled The Kigali After: A New City for the End of the World is about the politics of urban design, displacement, and the dual crises of capitalism and ecology in one of the fastest urbanizing cities the world: Kigali, Rwanda. His new research project focuses on diasporic communities in three African sanctuary cities. Shearer’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Fulbright Institute of International Education, the Social Science Research Council, and The Divided City Initiative.
Shearer received his PhD from the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University in 2017. Before joining WashU’s Department of African and African American Studies, he was a Mark Steinberg Weil Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Humanities in The Center for Humanities at Washington University.
