Welcome to our new faculty member
Dr. Rama Salla Dieng (PhD, SOAS University of London and Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy - FHEA) joins the Graduate Institute as Associate Professor in Gender, International Relations and Political Science (IR/PS) and Co-Director of the Gender Centre. Prior to joining the Institute, she was a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh (UK) where she worked for 6 years and an adjunct Senior Lecturer at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance (University of Cape Town, South Africa).
Dieng’s research focuses on feminist international relations, African politics, and feminist political economy analyses of land, labour, social reproduction and food in Africa and Western Europe.
She has been published in renowned journals such as Politics and Gender, The Review of African Political Economy, The Journal of Peasant Studies, and CODESRIA’s Africa Development. More recently, she has been working on feminist artivism and contentious politics; as well as anti-gender politics and its intersections with American foreign policy in West Africa. Since 2022, Dr Dieng is the co-convenor of the joint European Association of Development Training and Research Institute and UK Development Studies Association (EADI-DSA) Working groupon the Political Economy and Political Ecology of Land, Labour and Food. She is also the Program Chair (2026-28) of the International Studies Association’s Feminist Theory and Gender Section (FTGS).
Beyond academia, Dr Dieng regularly advises governments, international development agencies and civil society organisations on gender-transformative and feminist policies, intersectionality, and decolonisation. She is a member of the Scottish Government Research Advisory Group for the Women and Girls Fund Evaluation.
Dr Dieng is the recipient of the 2025 Paula Kantor Award for Excellence in field research. She holds degrees in Political Science and International Studies from the Bordeaux Institute of Political Studies (Science Po Bordeaux) and the University of Bordeaux, France, an MSc and PhD from the SOAS, University of London, UK, and a Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice from the University of Edinburgh, UK.