About the Team

Nicki Hitchcott is Professor of French and African Studies at the University of St Andrews. She is a specialist in postcolonial literatures in French from Africa and the diaspora. Her past research, funded by the AHRC, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, has focused on West African women’s writing, migrant fiction, and fictional and testimonial responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Nicki is the author of three single-authored monographs: Women Writers in Francophone Africa (2000), Calixthe Beyala: Performances of Migration (2006) and Rwanda Genocide Stories: Fiction after 1994 (2015). She has published a further nine co-authored/co-edited volumes on various aspects of francophone postcolonial studies and has just completed a manuscript, co-edited with Nsah Mala for a book on Ecotexts in the Postcolonial Francosphere, published in 2025 in the Francophone Postcolonial Studies series.

Alice Urusaro Uwagaga Karekezi is a Rwandan scholar and practitioner with more than three decades of experience in post-conflict contexts, peace and security, justice, gender, and social transformation. She is a researcher and co-investigator on this project. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on post-genocide reconstruction and home-grown solutions, reconciliation, decolonial transitional justice, gender and coloniality, genocide denial, African knowledge systems and migrations, and African feminist worldmaking. Her practical expertise includes women’s human rights in conflict situations, peace support operations, gender-responsive training, and regional peace and security in East Africa. Alice has worked with institutions including CODESRIA, the African Leadership Centre, the East African Community, the Eastern Africa Standby Force, the Amandla Institute for Policy and Leadership Advancement, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She is a co-founder of the Center for Conflict Management, now the Center for Genocide and Conflict Studies (CGCS) at the University of Rwanda.

John D McInally is a research fellow in Francophone African Studies at the University of St Andrews. He completed his AHRC-funded PhD project at the University of Liverpool in early 2024. His thesis, entitled ‘Dynamics of Domination? Rwandan Survivor-Witness Agency and Representation in Collaborative Testimonial Writing,’ examined the tripartite relationship between Rwandan survivor-witness, Western co-author, and publishing house in the production and publication processes of French-language collaborative testimonies. His research interests include the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Belgian colonialism in Africa and its ongoing impact, publishing dynamics in the French-speaking world, and bibliography in the context of works by authors from sub-Saharan Africa. A monograph based on his PhD thesis is under contract for publication with Palgrave Macmillan.