2018 ESSAY PRIZE Winner![]()
Claudia Gastrow, “Aesthetic Dissent: Urban Redevelopment and Political Belonging in
Luanda, Angola,” in Antipode, Vol. 49, No. 2, pp. 377-376.
Claudia Gastrow is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the
University of Johannesburg. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of
Chicago in 2014. Her work focuses primarily on Angola, with thematic emphases on the
intersection of urbanism and the politics, specifically investigating belonging, class, and the
exercise of power through the lens of architecture, urban development and infrastructure. More
recently she has expanded her interests to include questions of the financialization of urban
development in Africa and the significance of gender in the experience and exercise of power.
She is an editor of African Studies and serves on the editorial collective of African Studies
Review. From 2019 to 2021 she is an Iso Lomso fellow at the Stellenbosch Institution for
Advanced Studies. She has also been the recipient of awards from the SSRC, the ACLS, and the
Wenner-Gren Foundation.
List of 2018 Essay Contestants
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- Alice Aterianus-Owanga & Mathilde Debain, “Demain, un jour nouveau? Un
renversement électoral confisqué au Gabon”, in Politique africaine, 2016/4, N°144 | pages
157 à 179. Alice Aterianus-Owanga earned her PhD in Anthropology from the Université Lyon II in 2013.
Currently, she is Maitre-Assistant at the Université de Lausanne (Switzerland). Mathilde Debain
is a PhD candidate at the University of Paris 1-Sorbonne. - Gillian Mathys, “Bringing History Back In: Past, Present, and Conflict in Rwanda and
the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo,” in Journal of African History, Vol. 58, No3,
2017, pp. 465-487. Gillian Mathys is a postdoc fellow at the History Department of Ghent University (Belgium). - Geoffroy Heimlich, “The Kongo Cross Across Centuries,” African Arts, Autumn 2016 Vol. 49, No. Geoffroy Heimlich earned a PhD in Archeology from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) and in History (Université Paris 1, France). He is a researcher affiliated with the Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF, France) and an honorary research fellow at Rock Art Research Institute at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa).
- Matt Swagler and Héloïse Kiriakou. “Autonomous Youth Organizations’ Conquest of Political Power in Congo-Brazzaville, 1963-1968.” In Etudiants africains en mouvement: contribution à une histoire des années 68, ed. Françoise Blum, Pierre Guidi and Ophélie Rillon, 57-76. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016. Matt Swagler is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Williams College.Héloïse Kiriakou is a PhD candidate at Institut des Mondes Africains (IMAF), Université Paris 1– Panthéon Sorbonne.
- Vicky Van Bockhaven, “Anioto: Leopard-Men Killings and Institutional Dynamism in Northeast Congo, c. 1890-1940, in Journal of African History, Vol. 59, No. 1, 2018, pp. 21-44. [Ghent University, Belgium].
- Alice Aterianus-Owanga & Mathilde Debain, “Demain, un jour nouveau? Un