Associate Professor of English, University of Burundi
Research Fellow, DePaul University (CWCIT)
Jodi Mikalachki is Associate Professor of English at the University of Burundi's Institute of Applied Pedagogy in Bujumbura. A Canadian by birth and upbringing, she did her initial degrees at the University of Toronto in Modern Languages and English Literature, followed by an interdisciplinary doctorate at Yale University. She taught on the faculty of Wellesley College in Massachusetts for fifteen years, moving to Burundi in 2008, where she served as a rural teacher and teacher trainer before joining the University of Burundi in Bujumbura. She has lectured in Africa, Europe and the United States on Burundian responses to genocide and civil war, from nonviolent strategies for narrating conflict in contemporary Burundian literature to the historical witness and legacy of the Martyrs of Fraternity of Buta, who refused at gunpoint to separate by ethnicity when their school was attacked during Burundi's 1993-2005 civil war. She has also translated two books by Burundian authors that speak to and resist the nation's recent history of political violence: Zacharie Bukuru's We Are All Children of God: The Story of the Forty Young Martyrs of Buta—Burundi (Paulines Africa, 2015) and Antoine Kaburahe's Hutsi: In the Name of Us All (Iwacu, 2019).
Her own research focuses on gender, nationalism and nonviolent responses to grief and loss, particularly in contexts of political manipulation and conflict. In addition to recent essays on Burundian genocide and civil war literature, she has also published an article on "Fraternity, Martyrdom and Peace in Burundi: The Forty Servants of God of Buta," which appears in the Fall 2021 issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism. Currently a research fellow at DePaul University's Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology, she is working on the history, theology and politics of martyrdom and its commemoration. She is particularly interested in emerging testimonies from youth in the global south, and in the Church's recognition of collective national witness to sacrificial love in contexts of political violence, including the Martyrs of Algeria (2018), the Polish Martyrs or Martyrs of World War II (1999), and the Martyrs of Uganda (1964). She is writing a book about the Martyrs of Fraternity of Burundi, whose cause was opened in 2019 in the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Destined for a general audience, the book will offer a contextualized understanding of violence and its transformation in contemporary Africa. It will also highlight the role of African Catholics and Catholic institutions led by Africans in overcoming genocidal division, demonstrating the effectiveness of enculturated African Catholicism in mobilizing youth to resist genocidal manipulation for the transformation of their communities and nations.
Conference Presentation—Topic to come
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