Adom Getachew
Ethiopian-American political scientist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Adom Getachew is an Ethiopian-American political scientist. She is Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.[1] She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination.[2][3][4][5][6]
Adom Getachew | |
|---|---|
Adom Getachew at the 2023 Tanner Lectures on Human Values | |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Virginia, Yale University |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of Chicago |
| Main interests | history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory |
| Website | political-science |
Adom was awarded a PhD in Political Science and African-American Studies from Yale University in 2015.[7] She was born in Ethiopia. She was raised in Ethiopia and Botswana until the age of 13, when her family moved to Arlington, Virginia, United States.[8][9][10]
Work
Her first book, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019), centers the work of African, African American, and Caribbean anticolonial nationalists and their efforts to challenge the global hierarchy.[11] Ultimately, she argues that legally decolonized countries face unequal legal, economic, and social integration in the international plane.[12] These stratified relationships continue to perpetrate imperial structures.
In addition to her academic work, Getachew has been actively involved in curatorial projects. In 2024–2025, she was a co-organizer and curator of Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, presented at the Art Institute of Chicago in collaboration with MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and KANAL–Centre Pompidou Brussels. [13] The exhibition brought together approximately 350 works by artists from Africa, the Americas, and Europe, examining Pan-Africanism as a cultural and political project.
