Okwui Enwezor Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Culture, Performance Studies and Critical Humanities
Abebe studied Literature (BA) and Cultural Studies (MA) at Addis Ababa University (AAU) (2010). He served at AAU as a lecturer, researcher, and Deputy Dean of Humanities. He continued working with AAU as an assistant professor at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Center for African Studies, and College of Performing and Visual Arts after he completed his PhD in Performance Historiography at the University of Minnesota (2018). He is also board member of a multi-genre online journal, AGITATE, at the University of Minnesota.
Abebe uses academia, performance, and media as sites of cultural politics from which to interrogate representational practices. Abebe engages with sedimented embodied historiographies in order to understand what it means to be human in the here and now. Currently, he is working on his book project, which studies the ways in which Ethiopian female performers maneuver and reinvent spaces of empires, revolutions, and neoliberal globalization.
Publications
- Eds. Surafel W. Abebe, Anthony Bogues, Leora Farber-Blackbeard, & Zamansele Nsele, The Imagined New: Or, What happens When History is a Catastrophe?. (Johannesburg: iwalewabooks, 2022)
- "Mindful Space-making: Crossing Boundaries with Ananya Dance Theatre" in Dancing Transnational Feminisms: Ananya Dance Theatre and the Art of Social Justice. Eds. Ananya Chatterjea, Hui Nia Wilcox & Alenssandra Lebea Williams. (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2022), 127-143.
- "Re-excavating the Present: Inserting Embodied Stories in Ethiopia's Transitional Time- Space" in The Imagined New: Or, What happens When History is a Catastrophe?. Eds. Surafel W. Abebe, Anthony Bogues, Leora Farber-Blackbeard, & Zamansele Nsele.(Johannesburg: Iwalewabooks, 2022).
- "Left Ruins in Ethiopia: Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroempistemic Historiography,"Pamiętni Teatranly, 70, 4 (2021): 161-182.
- “Fractured Threads: Surafel’s Letter to the Class.” AGITATE! 3, (2021).
- “Crossing Boundaries: Reflections on a Festival-Conference.” Horn of Africa Bulletin. Life and Peace Institute (2016).
