Nisrin Elamin

Guest Author

Nisrin Elamin (@minlayla77) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Nisrin’s work investigates the connections between land, race, belonging and empire-making in Sudan and the broader Sahel region. She uses land and struggles over land as a lens through which to examine state surveillance of Sahelian migration as well as Gulf Arab corporate investments and political interventions in Sudan and neighboring countries.

Nisrin is currently working on a book project based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Sudan, where she conducted research in local courts, farming communities, investor conferences, agribusiness farms, government ministries, and in the zawiyas of Sufi religious leaders mediating land disputes in the aftermath of large-scale land enclosures. The book examines the ways landless and landholding communities are negotiating and contesting changes in land ownership prompted by a recent wave of domestic and Gulf Arab corporate investments in Sudanese land.

Before pursuing a PhD, Nisrin spent over a decade working as an educator, researcher and organizer in the US and taught for several years in Tanzania. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, she taught at Bryn Mawr College and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University in the United States. She is also on LinkedIn.