Sabine Mohamed 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.

At Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins

• 2026 (fall) Violence, Race, and the Unruly Body (UG)
• 2026 (fall) Proposal Writing (G)
• 2025 (spring) Migration and Empire/Imperialism (UG) with the Hopkins Semester in D.C. program
• 2024 (fall) African Cities (UG)
• 2024 (fall) Violence, Race, and Gender (UG)
• 2024 (spring) Defining Region (G)
• 2024 (spring) Sex, Gender, Culture (UG/G)
• 2023 (fall) The Idea of Africa (UG)
• 2023 (fall) Readings in Anthropology (G)
• 2023 (spring) Defining Region (G)*
• 2023 (spring) Violence, Race, and the Unruly Body (UG)*

*Undergraduate Course

*Graduate Seminar

Books

Monographs

(in progress) Losing Ground: Emergent Black Empire and Counter-Futures in Urban Ethiopia

Edited Volumes

2026 OPEN BOOK. Capture, Connect, Shift. Mohamed, Sabine, and Jatin Dua, eds. Society for Cultural Anthropology.

2021 Bildung – Ein postkoloniales Manifest. As bildungs*Lab Collective. Münster: Unrast Verlag.

Articles and Essays

2026b "Losing Ground: Black Empire and Affective Infrastructure in Urban Ethiopia." In Capture, Connect, Shift, edited by Sabine Mohamed and Jatin Dua, 143–170. https://doi.org/10.14506/ob.ccs.072024

2026a "Introduction: Mobility and Inhabitation Amidst Racial Capital." With Jatin Dua. In Capture, Connect, Shift, edited by Sabine Mohamed and Jatin Dua, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.14506/ob.ccs.intro2022b

2024 "Chokepoints and Queer Becoming." Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, no. 1 (2024): 59–64. https://doi.org/10.1353/vrg.2024.a922358

2023 "Notes on bewilderment, suspension, and urban life at the extensions." Dialogues in Human Geography 0(0). Online first. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231217567

2022c "Dead on Arrival: Beirut, Bodies, and Futurity in Addis Ababa." Disembodied Territories project

2022b "Introduction: Eritrea's Uneasy Futures and Their Historical Contingencies." With Magnus Treiber and David O'Kane. Modern Africa: Politics, History, and Society, Special Issue: Rethinking Transition: Eritrea's Uneasy Future, 10:1, 5–32. https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v10i1.417

2022a "Afterword: The Black Box of Eritrean Futurity." Modern Africa: Politics, History, and Society, Special Issue: Rethinking Transition: Eritrea's Uneasy Future, 10:1, 145–164. https://doi.org/10.26806/modafr.v10i1.418

2021c "#Must Fall: Imagination, Sprache und Ästhetik." In Bildung – Ein postkoloniales Manifest, edited by bildungsLab* Collective. Münster: Unrast Verlag.

2021b "Bodies in the outside: Artistic imaginations in Afrofuturism." With MdM. Castro Varela. In Counter_Readings of the Body, edited by Daniel Neugebauer, 57–64. Leipzig: Spector Books.

2021a "Intersektionalität und Postkoloniale Soziale Arbeit." With MdM. Castro Varela. In Handbuch Intersektionalitätsforschung, edited by A. Mefebue, A. Bührmann, and S. Grenz. Wiesbaden: Springer Verlag. Online first. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-26613-4_39-1

2020 "#MustFall: Überlegungen zur Dekolonialisierung und einer postkolonialen Ästhetik an der Universität." Tertium Comparationis: Journal for International Comparative and Multicultural Education 26:1, 22–37. https://web.archive.org/web/20230321151706id_/https://www.pedocs.de/volltexte/2023/26233/pdf/TC_2020_1_Mohamed_MustFall_Ueberlegungen.pdf

2019 "Ethiopian image: face, trace, interiority." New Writing, Special Issue: Convoluting the Dialectical Image, 16:4, 453–457. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1567797

2015 "Djibouti: Das Tor der Tränen." In Grenzen erzählen Geschichten. Was Landkarten offenbaren, edited by David Signer, 89–91. Zürich: Neue Zürcher Zeitung Verlag.

2014 "Schwarzes feministisches Denken und Handeln in Deutschland." With M. Eggers [Auma]. In Feminismen heute, Positionen in Theorie und Praxis, edited by Yvonne Franke et al., 57–76. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag.

Scientific Reports

2012 "... Nicht so greifbar und doch real" – Eine quantitative und qualitative Studie zu Gewalt- und (Mehrfach-)Diskriminierungserfahrungen von lesbischen, bisexuellen Frauen und Trans* in Deutschland. With M. Castro Varela et al. LesMigras Antigewalt- und Antidiskriminierungsbereich der Lesbenberatung: Berlin. 244 pp.

Media Outreach (selected)

2025 "Fluid Margins and the Amiche: Jennifer Riggan in Conversation with Sabine Mohamed" (Podcast). The Steinbrucker Conversations – Shifting Perspectives: Imagining Europe from the Margins. May 30.

2024 "Schwarze Hunger" und "Weißer Ritter": "Do They Know It's Christmas" zementiert noch immer koloniale Vorurteile. Berliner Tagesspiegel, December 25. https://www.tagesspiegel.de/internationales/weisser-ritter-und-schwarzer-hunger-do-they-know-its-christmas-zementiert-noch-immer-koloniale-vorurteile-12921673.html

2019 Online dictionary entry "Schwarz" [Black/Blackness]. Diversity Arts Culture Institute, Berlin.

2018 Annotated bibliography on "Afrofuturism & Space is the Place." European Association of Sociocultural Anthropology (EASA) Network of Ethnographic Theory blog.

2014b "Hinrichtung kamerunischer Widerstandskämpfer." Neue Zürcher Zeitung, August 28.

2014a "Sturz des äthiopischen Kaisers." Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 15.

2013 "In Eritrea bleiben heisst sterben." Neue Zürcher Zeitung, November 31.

2012 "Überlegungen zu geschlechterpolitischen Bündnissen, ihre Chancen, ihre Probleme und Totgeburten." Heinrich Böll Foundation. [Online].