Enid Guéné is a historian of Central and East Africa with a special focus on social and cultural history. Her academic interests include cross-border migration and informality, the ways in which capitalism and colonialism have shaped local communities and their resilience in the face of industrialisation, economic crises, shifting political structures, and socio-economic transformations.
She joined the History Department at Ghent University in January 2024 as a postdoctoral research associate in the ERC project The Aftermath of Slavery (ASEA), where she investigates how former slaves in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo negotiated post-abolition contexts in the twentieth century.
Previously, she was a Research Associate at the University of Oxford, contributing to the ERC project Comparing the Copperbelt, where she analysed how urban populations in industrialised zones responded to economic fluctuations through informal trade, migration, and cultural production. Guéné earned her PhD from the University of Cologne, focusing on the histories of hunter-gatherer societies in Kenya and their transitions to pastoralism, agriculture, and cash economies in the twentieth century.
Guéné has conducted substantial fieldwork in several eastern and central African countries, integrating archival research with oral history and interdisciplinary methods. She also has a keen interest in archaeology and the study of material and immaterial cultures.
