Dr. Bayan Abubakr is a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. She is a historian, writer, and researcher who received her Ph.D. in History from Yale University in 2026.

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.

Dr. Abubakr’s book manuscript, The Marketplace of Empire: Frontier Reform and the Making of Ottoman Sudan, 1840-1924, is based on her dissertation and 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 situate Sudan at the confluence of Ottoman reform, the global abolition movement, and the competition over territory in Africa.

The Marketplace of Empire examines Sudan as a key political economy in the late Ottoman Empire. It traces four arenas of struggle: the fiscal politics of merchant elites in Suakin; international efforts to suppress the trade of enslaved peoples; the frontier expansion of merchant-warlords along Sudan’s western borderlands; and the transformation of military institutions and colonial knowledge production under Anglo-Egyptian rule. Throughout the long nineteenth century, Sudan’s political geographies emerged from enduring contestation between local elites, imperial bureaucrats, and corporate networks.

Dr. Abubakr’s academic and public facing writings have appeared in Mada Masr, The New York Times, and Jadaliyya. She 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.