Chouki El Hamel

Founding Director

Dr. Chouki El Hamel is a Professor of History and the Director of the Center for Maghrib Studies at Arizona State University. A distinguished Africanist scholar specializing in the social and intellectual history of West and Northwest Africa, he earned his doctorate from the University of Sorbonne. Professor El Hamel’s groundbreaking research examines the dynamics of power, resistance, and subaltern agency within Islamic societies, with a deep focus on the histories of slavery, race, and gender. A central pillar of his work investigates marronage, the processes of escape and the formation of independent communities by enslaved people, as a critical act of resistance. His scholarship also traces the profound cultural and spiritual legacy of these histories, particularly through the evolution of the Gnawa community, whose mystical musical traditions emerged from the experiences of enslaved West Africans in Morocco.

He is the author of the seminal work, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013). The book was hailed as a bestseller by TelQuel, Morocco’s leading francophone news magazine, and its influential French translation, Le Maroc noir (2019), has sparked widespread public discourse. His current project is a forthcoming book titled Marronage in Morocco: The Long Struggle for Self-Emancipation, 1672-1956.

His research has been supported by prestigious fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center, and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. An engaged public intellectual, he frequently contributes expert commentaries to major international and Moroccan media, including Le Monde, Jadaliyya, and the prominent Moroccan history magazine Zamane, as well as TelQuel. Furthering his commitment to public scholarship, he launched the innovative digital resource The Story Map: Race & Slavery to illuminate North Africa’s complex histories of racialization, enslavement and cultural resilience for a global audience.