Nada Mustafa Ali

Nada Mustafa Ali is a scholar who engages with questions about social change and transformation in Sudan and beyond through her teaching, research, and activism. Dr. Ali teaches in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department and is a core faculty in the Human Rights Minor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is an affiliate faculty in the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the same university.

Formerly, Dr. Ali taught at the New School University and Clark University. She held research fellowship or associate positions at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center, Fordham University, and the International Center for Research on Women.

Dr. Ali’s teaching covers the areas of gender, intersectionality, critical development studies, human rights, and qualitative research. Dr. Ali’s current research focuses on three overlapping areas. She is working on a digital ethnography on women, social media, and activism in contemporary Sudan. Dr. Ali is also researching Gender, Militarization, and peace-building in Sudan and South Sudan; and Gender and HIV/AIDS in the Middle East and Africa.

Dr. Ali has written and published extensively in Arabic and English. Her book Gender, Race and Sudan's Exile Politics: Do We All Belong to this Country? Was published by Lexington Books, (an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield), in 2015.

In addition to her academic career, Dr. Ali is an activist and policy specialist who has worked at or consulted for several UN agencies, (including UNDP, UNFPA, and UN Women) research institutes, and international, regional and national civil society organizations. She is on the Advisory Board of the African Feminist Initiative.

Dr. Ali received her PhD in Government (Development Studies) from Manchester University in the UK. She has a BA (Hon.) and an MA from the University of Khartoum and the American University in Cairo respectively. Both in political science.