‘Vigil’ by acclaimed author George Saunders kicks off the new Campus Reading Program
May 13, 2026
Mariam Fofana, a third-year student in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a $35,000 Beinecke Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in African history, specializing in modern and contemporary West African and diasporic histories.
Northwestern’s 11th Beinecke Scholar, Fofana majors in history, with a regional concentration in the Middle East and Africa.
“I have always understood the practice of seeking knowledge to be an eternal quest, and I am beyond humbled to have received this honor alongside some of the nation’s brightest minds,” Fofana said. “In pursuing graduate studies, I hope to fill silences in the historical record of my people and return to my homeland with scholarship that widens the archive of who we have been and who we might become. I believe this award brings me one step closer to that calling.”
Born in the Bronx to Sierra Leonean immigrant parents, Fofana’s intellectual interests center the afterlives of displacement and the unrecorded labors of West African womanhood.
Her scholarly interests include gender, migration, refugeehood, sociolinguistics, postcolonial cultural production and dress/fashion studies, particularly as they concern questions of identity and mobility.
Over the past two summers, she has pursued independent ethnographic research. She has investigated how Sierra Leonean sex workers use the Krio language to articulate memory and imagine futurity. And in a second project, she has explored how refugee West African women craft homelands and communities in Chicago and New York City. Together, these projects zero in on how belonging is enacted through gendered memory, oral history and urban spatial practices.
Beyond her independent work, Fofana also has researched nightlife and domesticity in colonial Nigeria as part of Northwestern’s Material History Lab with Akinwumi Ogundiran, a professor of history and Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences.
Fofana previously received a Mellon Mays Fellowship and a Gilman International Scholarship. She has participated in the Kaplan Humanities Scholars Program and the Brady Scholars Program in Ethics and Civic Life. She is currently participating in the Leopold Fellowship and is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.
Northwestern students interested in pursuing scholarship and fellowship opportunities should contact the Office of Fellowships to learn more.
