Prof. Josephine J. Dawuni is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Howard University, Washington D.C. She holds an LL.B from the University of Ghana, and is a qualified Barrister-at-Law before the Ghana Superior Courts of Judicature. She holds a Doctorate in Political Science from Georgia State University. Her primary areas of research include judicial politics, gender and the law, international human rights, women’s civil society organizing and democratization. She is the editor (with Judge Akua Kuenyehia) of International Courts and the African Woman Judge: Unveiled Narratives (Routledge, 2018). Her first edited book (with Gretchen Bauer) Gender and the Judiciary in Africa: From Obscurity to Parity?  was published in 2016 by Routledge. In 2016, she was awarded the prestigious Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship to undertake a project on graduate student mentoring and research at the Faculty of Law, University of Ghana. She is the founder and Executive Director of the non-profit Institute for African Women in Law (IAWL) which focuses on enhancing the capacity of women in the legal professions in Africa and the Diaspora. She is a Global Scholar at the Wilson Center Women in Public Service Project. She is a Board Member on the West Africa Research Association (WARA). She sits on the Board of the African Research Academies for Women (ARA-W).

Josephine Jarpa Dawuni belongs to several professional bodies and is currently the Co-Convener of the Gender and Judging Collaborative Research Network of the Law and Society Association, Co-Convener of the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association and the Co-Convener of the Women and Gender Studies Collective at Howard University. She sits on the editorial board of the Journal of International Politics and Development (JIPAD) and the Peter Lange Book Series on Studies in Law and Politics. Her research has appeared in journals such as Studies in Gender and Development in Africa, Journal of African Law, University of Baltimore Law Journal and Africa Today. In 2017 she was a Visiting Scholar a Queen’s University Faculty of Law in Kingston, ON, Canada, and in 2015 she was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Copenhagen Faculty of Law iCourts Center of Excellence for International Courts. Dr. Dawuni has presented her research internationally at several professional conferences and has been invited to speak at several universities.