Adom Getachew is a Ph.D. candidate in the Departments of African-American Studies and Political Science at Yale. In 2009, she received her B.A. (with high honors) from the University of Virginia in Politics and African-American Studies. Her areas of interest include the history of political thought, international law, histories and theories of imperialism and race, black political thought and post-colonial political thought. Adom’s dissertation entitled, “The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination,” excavates and reconstructs the account of self-determination offered by statesmen and intellectuals of the black Atlantic, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, Julius Nyrere and Michael Manley. The project sheds new light on anti-colonial nationalism, by arguing these nationalists moved beyond the telos of national independence to engage in a project of world-making.
