The African Studies Association of the United Kingdom (ASAUK) is delighted to announce that Dr Lena M. Reim is the winner of the Best African Studies PhD Dissertation Prize 2026.
Dr Reim receives the prize for her PhD dissertation, titled Politics and Postmemory in Zimbabwe: Second-Generation Narratives of the Gukurahundi Violence (University of Oxford, 2024).
After careful consideration of the ten submitted nominations, Dr Reim’s work was chosen out of a shortlist of four. Although each nominated dissertation has significant strengths and makes original and important contributions to various sub-fields of African Studies, the prize committee found Dr Reim’s work the strongest in the light of the criteria for the prize, which are scholarly excellence, original contribution, ethical research practice, the engagement with African contexts, and the significance for African Studies at large.
According to the committee, Dr Reim’s dissertation is grounded in excellent scholarship and rigorous, extensive, and ethically sensitive fieldwork in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, concerning politically sensitive issues. It offers a rich account of political storytelling about a foundational period of violent state repression in post-independence Zimbabwe, widely known as Gukurahundi, by second-generation survivors of that violence whose activism has recently broken through decades of state silencing. As such, the work advances the theorisation of ‘postmemory’ and the ‘afterlife’ of periods of violence, demonstrating how intergenerational memory becomes entangled with dynamics of citizenship, ethnicity, competing visions of nationhood, and the ongoing quest for justice. Its insights and arguments speak well beyond the Zimbabwean context and have substantial relevance to major debates in African Studies and adjacent fields, such as politics, international relations, law, and development studies.
The three other nominated dissertations that made it to the shortlist are:
- Bethlehem Bayuh Attfield, Translating Indigenous African Literature: A Case Study of Adam Reta’s Amharic Fiction (University of Birmingham, 2025).
- Lisa Kwaleyela, Peacebuilding and Conflict Prevention in Mine Areas: Improving Community Participation in Zambia’s Copperbelt (University of Oxford, 2025).
- Patricia Tshomba, Exploring African Women’s Agency in Land Access in Urban Agriculture: The Case of Women within Kinshasa’s Urban Agriculture, DR Congo (University of Leeds, 2025).
As an Association, we congratulate Dr Reim, as well as the other finalists, on this recognition of their work, and we look forward to their further contributions to African Studies!
About the prize
The ASAUK’s Best African Studies PhD Dissertation Prize is a biannual prize awarded to the best doctoral thesis in African Studies which has been successfully examined in a UK institution of higher education during the two calendar years immediately preceding the ASAUK Conference. The prize was inaugurated in 1993, and from 1996 to 2023 was named the Audrey Richards Prize for African Studies. Dr Audrey Richards, CBE (1899–1984) was a pioneering British social anthropologist who worked mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, notably Zambia, South Africa and Uganda. She held lectureships and directorships at LSE, Witwatersrand, Makerere, and Cambridge. She was the Second President of ASAUK. In 2023, ASAUK Council made a decision to name all our prizes simply as ASAUK prizes, and to the prize is again called the ASAUK Dissertation Prize from now on.
This year’s prize (covering the period 2024-25) was awarded during the conference at the University of Durham, 10-12 September 2026. The prize committee consisted of Zaynab Ango (University of Abuja), Innocent Batsani-Ncube (SOAS University of London), Benjamin Kirby (University of Bayreuth), and Tolulope Osayomi (University of Ibadan), and was chaired by ASAUK Vice President, Adriaan van Klinken (University of Leeds).
ASAUK wishes to gratefully acknowledge Taylor & Francis for their support of this prize.