Gabeba Baderoon is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African Studies and Comparative Literature. She co-directs the African Feminist Initiative at Penn State with Alicia Decker and Maha Marouan. Baderoon received a PhD in English from the University of Cape Town and has held Post-doctoral fellowships in the Africana Research Center and the “Islam, African Publics and Religious Values” Project. Among her honors are the Sarah Baartman Senior Fellowship at the University of Cape Town, an Extraordinary Professorship of English at Stellenbosch University, and fellowships at the African Gender Institute, the Nordic Africa Institute, the Rockefeller Centre at Bellagio and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. Baderoon is the author of Regarding Muslims: from Slavery to Post-Apartheid, which received the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences Best Non-fiction Monograph Award, and the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy. She also co-edited the award-winning essay collection, Surfacing: on Being Black and Feminist, with Desiree Lewis. Baderoon’s work has been honored with the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry, the Elisabeth Eybers Poetry Prize, the University of Johannesburg Prize for South African Writing and three awards from the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences: for Best Poetry Book, Best Non-Fiction Monograph and Best Edited Collection. The project she is working on for her CHI Fellowship is a poetic autobiography titled, "The Concussion Diaries: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind."