Sabine Mohamed is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at Johns Hopkins University. She is a political, urban, and economic anthropologist. She received her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Heidelberg in 2021. Her dissertation and current book project, entitled Losing Ground: Emergent Black Empire and Counter-Futures in Urban Ethiopia, ethnographically explores how categories of blackness and race, as well as experiences of urban and national dispossession are attached to an infrastructure of emergent empire in East Africa. This work is based on her fieldwork in Addis Ababa working with young informal laborers, female domestic workers, as well as refugees and deported returnees of Eritrean descent. She has also conducted archival research that traces the multi-directional transatlantic circulation of blackness, between the Caribbean, North America, and Ethiopia. Her next project will follow female laborers through the gendered and racialized routes of economic exchange, Chinese investment, and resource extraction in the East African corridor. In addition to her research in East Africa, she has an ongoing long-term project situating black feminist movements, sexualities, and practices of belonging in contemporary Germany.

Before joining Johns Hopkins University, Sabine was a “Bridge to the Faculty” postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and prior to that a doctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She has been the co-convenor of the Network for Contemporary Anthropological Theory with the European Association for Social Anthropologists (2020-2022), and is also a founding member of bildungslab*, a collective of feminist scholars of color in the German-speaking world on reimagining education, the classroom, and pedagogy.