Tara is a PhD candidate studying African History. She focuses on gender, law, and ethics in pre-colonial and colonial Igboland, southeastern Nigeria. With her dissertation, Tara seeks to augment discourses on African indigenous religions, indigenous and colonial law in Africa, and changing gender dynamics in pre-colonial and colonial Africa.
Tara received the Fulbright-IIE U.S. Student Award and the Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program Award (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and granted through the Social Science Research Council) to fund her dissertation research in southeastern Nigeria from January to December 2018.
Tara taught a Historical Methods and Skills course on “The Rule of Law in Colonial Africa” for the Spring 2019 semester. She will teach a different section of Historical Methods and Skills, “Women in African Colonial Histories,” for the Fall 2019 semester. Tara has also worked as a Journal of West African History editorial assistant, as a research assistant for history professors, as a teaching assistant for interdisciplinary undergraduate courses (in the classroom and online), and as the teaching assistant for a graduate-level international social science research grant writing course.
She is a member of the African Studies Association (ASA), the ASA Women’s Caucus, the Nigerian Studies Association, and the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Tara also works for the MSU Writing Center and volunteers as the graduate assistant coach for MSU’s D1 Women’s club hockey team. She earned her B.A in English and African Cultures & Colonialism from St. Olaf College, May 2014.