Wendy Wilson-Fall is a social anthropologist, Professor, and Chair of Africana Studies at Lafayette College.

Formerly a Director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal (1999-2004), she was President of the Board of the West African Research Association (2016-2020), and remains an ex-officio board member. She is on the boards of The Africa Network and ARED (Associates for Research and Education in Development), an organization that supports literacy in West African languages.

Wilson-Fall’s research and writing concern themes of exclusivity, inclusion, marginalization, and difference. In addition to her ongoing research and publishing on the topic of pastoralism and herders in West Africa, she Memories of Madagascar and Slavery in the Black Atlantic (2015 Ohio University Press), and is currently engaging her Indian Ocean research in relation to black sailors of the mid-nineteenth century who traveled out of American New England ports. She has also written extensively on the problem of local and global meanings of “blackness” as a category.