Bayan Abubakr is a writer, researcher, archivist, and Ph.D. Candidate of History at Yale University.

Her work focuses on and addresses Sudan's historical and contemporary dilemmas as they relate to issues of racialization, militarization, and global and local empire-making schemes. Bayan’s dissertation, "The Marketplace of Empire: Frontier Reform and the Making of Ottoman Sudan, 1840-1924," centers Sudan in trans-Saharan and Ottoman histories of slavery, circuits of capital, and political histories of imperialism. She reads Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and English sources to argue that nineteenth-century Sudan did not emerge through a center-periphery hierarchy, but through shifting relations between imperial bureaucrats, provincial elites, and corporate networks. Bayan’s academic and public facing writings have appeared in Mada Masr, The New York Times, and Jadaliyya.

Bayan created a syllabus to encourage critical readings of the the April 15, 2023 counterrevolutionary war in Sudan. This project is directly inspired by Dr. Razan Idris and Dr. Kaylaa Renée Wheeler's respective syllabus projects, #SudanSyllabus and the #BlackIslamSyllabus. Please find the "Seeing the World Through Sudan" syllabus here and under the public resources tab.