Rate My Professor Katherine Luongo

Katherine Luongo is Associate Professor of History and International Affairs at Northeastern University in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. She received her PhD in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2006. As a specialist in the anthropological history of Kenya, Luongo investigates legal systems in colonial and contemporary Africa, global legal regimes, and human rights. Her research encompasses witchcraft-driven violence across Africa, approached through legal anthropology, legal history, migration, and human rights studies. She examines witchcraft allegations made by African asylum-seekers and how these interact with asylum-seeking protocols at local, national, and global scales over the last two decades. Luongo also analyzes the engagement of humanitarian organizations with witchcraft-driven violence. Furthermore, her work addresses the legal history of human rights in Kenya from the 1960s into the 1990s, with emphasis on illegal detentions, human rights activism, political trials, and lawfare. She has been a faculty member in the Department of History at Northeastern University since 2007, initially as Assistant Professor of History (Africa).

Luongo is the author of several key books in her field, including Witchcraft and Colonial Rule in Kenya, 1900-1955 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Obama and Kenya: Contested Histories and the Politics of Belonging (co-authored with Matthew Carotenuto, Ohio University Press, 2016), and African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs (Routledge, 2023). Her current monograph project is Law without Justice: A History of Human Rights in Kenya. Luongo's contributions have earned her notable recognitions, such as the College of Social Sciences and Humanities Dean’s Research Development Program Award in 2013 for her project “Witches and Bureaucrats: Witchcraft-Driven Violence in Africa and its Relation to Global Asylum-Seeking,” and the Smuts Visiting Research Fellowship from the University of Cambridge to advance Commonwealth Studies through research. She is a member of the African Studies Association and the American Society for Legal History, contributing to the academic community in History and related disciplines.