Dr. Shakirah Hudani is Assistant Professor in the Department of African, African American and Diaspora Studies (AAAD) at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. She is jointly appointed in the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP). She specializes in African urbanism and post-conflict urban change. Her research to date focuses on urban change in post-genocide Rwanda, with relevance to the Great Lakes region, and to urban planning processes in African cities more broadly. She began working in Rwanda in 2002, examining the Gacaca transitional justice process, and more recently returned to research urbanization and contemporary planning. Her new research focuses on peripheral urban change in Nairobi.

Shakirah is interested in the intersection between post-colonial theory and studies of African cities, particularly focusing on questions of the recursive politics of the state after independence and issues of urban inclusion, as well as the local politics of place. She has held fellowships from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Institute for International Studies at UC Berkeley, and is a Rhodes Scholar (2004). She holds a PhD (2020) in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley.