Franke Visiting Fellows

The Franke Visiting Fellows Program, made possible by the generosity of Richard and Barbara Franke, allows the WHC to host one fellow each year. Since 2005, the program has supported an eclectic range of visiting fellows; the residency offers time to nurture creative processes and provides opportunities for informal collaboration across the University. Fellows set their own agendas while also participating in cross-disciplinary conversations with a collective of humanities scholars at the weekly WHC Fellows Forum. During their residency, Franke Visiting Fellows deliver a lecture or presentation about their works-in-progress; these events are free and open to the public.

Please note there is no application process—Franke Visiting Fellows are selected and invited by the director of the WHC.

2024–25 Fellow

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's picture

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi is a fiction writer and author of The First Woman (A Girl Is a Body of Water in US/Canada) which won the Jhalak Prize 2021, was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Award 2021, the Encore Prize 2021, the James Tait Black Prize 2021 and longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize 2021.  

Her first novel, Kintu, won the Kwani? Manuscript Project (2013); the Prix Transfuge du meilleur premier roman (2019); was shortlisted for Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award (2019) and longlisted for the Prix Médicis (2019).  

Her collection of short stories, Manchester Happened (Let’s Tell This Story Properly in US/Canada), was shortlisted for the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2019 and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.  

To work on her current project, Makumbi was Writer-in-Residence at NIAS-KNAW (the Netherlands) in 2021, Artist-in-Berlin DAAD in 2022, and Artist in Residence at STIAS Stellenbosch 2023. As a Franke Visiting Fellow in 2024–25 she hopes to complete the Pan-African novel, Alkebulan: When the Lions Returned.

She is a recipient of the prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize (2018). She also won the Global Commonwealth Short story prize in 2014. She has a Ph.D. from Lancaster University and has taught in several universities in the United Kingdom.