Sara
Byala
Sara Byala
University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania Faculty Fellow
Research Topic
A New Historical Survey of Contemporary African Judaism
Bio
Sara Byala is a senior lecturer in critical writing at the University of Pennsylvania and the associate director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute (PGDI). She is currently working on a multimodal history of Jewish communities across Africa that, to date, includes Uganda, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. Her research into the ways that capitalist systems intersect with social and cultural forces in Africa is based upon extensive archival research and fieldwork.
Byala holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Selected publications
- Bottled: How Coca-Cola Became African (Oxford University Press, 2023).
- A Place That Matters Yet: John Gubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
