Biography

J. Jarpa Dawuni is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University, Washington D.C. She is a qualified Barrister-at-Law before the Ghana Superior Courts. She holds a Doctorate in Political Science from Georgia State University. Her primary areas of research include judicial politics, women in the legal professions, gender and the law, international human rights, women’s civil society organizing, and democratization. Her recent books include: Intersectionality and Women’s Access to Justice in Africa (Lexington, 2022), Gender, Judging and the Courts in Africa: Selected Cases (Routledge, 2021),  International Courts and the African Woman Judge: Unveiled Narratives (Routledge, 2018) co-edited with Judge Akua Kuenyehia and Gender and the Judiciary in Africa: From Obscurity to Parity? (Routledge, 2016), co-edited with Gretchen Bauer. As a comparative scholar who uses qualitative methodologies, she has conducted fieldwork and primary data collection in over 10 African countries, the United Kingdom and Brazil.

She has held several global competitive fellowships, including as a two-time Fulbright Specialist Scholar, a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Fellowship in Austria, a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) in South Africa, and a Fellow of the French Institute for Advanced Studies at IMERA (Marseille, France). In 2016, she was awarded the 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 founding Director of the Howard University Center for Women, Gender, and Global Leadership established in 2020. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Women in Law Academia International Award from the Women in Law Initiative, Austria.

Dr. Dawuni has raised over $3 million in grants, gifts and fellowships. She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for a study on Comparative Demographic Variation in Judiciaries, which explores the representation of Black and Afro-descendant women judges in eight countries.

In 2016, she received the President Obama White House Presidential Award for her service on the Board of ARA-W. She is a Fellow at the Center for Democratic Development (CDD) Ghana. She is a Visiting Professor in the UNESCO Peace Masters Program at the University of Jaume 1 in Castellon, Spain. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Queens University, Kingston, Canada, and the University of Copenhagen iCourts Program in Denmark. 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 was a Global Scholar at the Wilson Center Women in Public Service Project. She served on the board of the West Africa Research Association (WARA) and the African Research Academies for Women (ARA-W). She has consulted for the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on gender and judicial integrity.

Dr. Dawuni belongs to several professional bodies. She is a Board Member of the African Studies Association and the Nine Dots Book Prize. She is a former Co-Convener of the Women’s Caucus of the African Studies Association. 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  International Journal of the Legal Profession, Studies in Gender and Development in Africa, Journal of African Law, University of Baltimore Law Journal, and Africa Today.  Dr. Dawuni has presented her research internationally at professional conferences and has been invited to speak at several universities, and international events and conferences.