Marius Kothor

Marius Kothor (PhD Yale '23) is an Assistant Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Starting from the premise that African women are powerful historical actors, Dr. Kothor's work moves beyond efforts to recover women’s agency to focus instead on how they worked to achieve their economic and political objectives.

Dr. Kothor’s first book project places West African women at the center of histories of global capitalism, decolonization, and postcolonial politics. It demonstrates how a group of Togolese women textile merchants, known collectively as the Nana Benz, used their transnational financial networks to influence political movements across West Africa and, in the process, became transnational icons.

Alongside her research on Togo’s textile merchants, Dr. Kothor is broadly interested in photography, fashion, and global Black liberation movements. She offers courses on the history of photography in Africa, Black Internationalism, and African women’s history.

As a former refugee, Dr. Kothor also writes publicly about how her experiences growing up in exile inform her research and writing on her native country, Togo. Her article exploring this topic is forthcoming in the American Historical Review and she has also written on this topic for the New York Times. Dr. Kothor has published in other academic and popular outlets including: The Oxford Encyclopedia of African History, Africa is a Country, and Black Perspectives.