Samuel Shearer’s research and teaching places ethnography, African and African American Studies in conversation with urban studies to account for the future of urban life in Africa and the United States. His first book, Kigali: a New City For the End of the World (University of California Press 2025) is an ethnography of efforts to find “green” market-driven urban solutions to the twin crises of capital and ecology and popular alternatives to sustainable urbanism in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.  His work has also been published in several journals and edited volumes and can be sampled here. In the Department of African and African American Studies, he teaches courses on urban theory, racial capitalism, and popular culture from a global, interdisciplinary, perspective.   

 

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.