Dr Katherine Luongo
Katherine Luongo is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University and deputy editor of African Studies Review. She is a specialist in the anthropological history of Kenya.
Dr Luongo studies legal systems in colonial and contemporary Africa, global legal regimes, and human rights. She is the author of Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2011). With Matthew Carotenuto, she is the author of Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories of Politics and Belonging (Ohio University Press, 2016), the first scholarly work to examine the history of Kenya through the experiences of the Obama family. Her most recent monograph, African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs (Routledge, 2023), investigates witchcraft-driven violence across Africa from the related standpoints of legal anthropology and legal history and migration and human rights studies. It analyzes how witchcraft allegations made by African asylum-seekers have interacted with the protocols of asylum-seeking on the local, national, and global levels over the last two decades and how humanitarian organizations have engaged with witchcraft-driven violence. Her current monograph project, Law without Justice: A History of Human Rights in Kenya, examines the legal history of human rights in Kenya from the 1960s into the 1990s, focusing on illegal detentions, human rights activism, political trials, and lawfare. She holds a Smuts Visiting Fellowship in Commonwealth Studies for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Select publications
- African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs. Routledge, 2023.
- Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging. Ohio University Press,
2016. [Co-authored with Matthew Carotenuto]. - Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- “‘The Problem of Witchcraft’: Violence and the Supernatural in Global African Refugee
Mobilities,” African Studies Review 63.3 (2020): 660-682. - “Allegations, Evidence, and Evaluation: Asylum-Seeking in a World with Witchcraft” in African
Asylum at a Crossroads: Activism, Expert Testimony, and Refugee Rights, eds. Iris Berger,
Benjamin Lawrance, Tricia Redeker-Hepner, and Meredith Terretta, (Athens [OH]: Ohio
University Press, 2015), 182-202.
Select awards
- 2025-2026 – Smuts Visiting Fellowship in Commonwealth Studies, Cambridge University,
- 2023 – Interdisciplinary Sabbatical Fellowship, Northeastern University
- 2015 – John W. Kluge Fellowship, Library of Congress
- 2014 – Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Visiting Fellowship, Princeton University
