Hi, I’m Allegra Ayida.

Allegra Ayida is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Yale, where she is a graduate fellow in the environmental humanities at the Whitney Humanities Center, and was named a Nathan Hale Associates fellow by Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is also a graduate fellow at both the European Studies Council and the Council on African Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center. She has worked at the Yale University Art Gallery as a Graduate Curatorial Intern in African Art, and at the literary magazine The Yale Review.

Allegra’s research interests span Nigerian history, maritime history, port cities, piracy, Africa–Europe relations, African art, material culture and the plant humanities. She is interested in the trade relationships between European and African traders, and the long history of interactions with different European powers through missionary activity along the West African coastline. She also researches the restitution of stolen and looted African artefacts and cultural heritage currently held by European museums.

Her dissertation project is tentatively titled “Palm Oil, Piracy and Pipeline Politics: An Economic and Environmental History of Warri, Nigeria, 1780–1980.” The project reads French, Italian, English and Nigerian archival sources alongside ethnographic, photographic and cartographic materials to construct the history of this port city over three centuries.

Allegra has given talks about her work at American universities including Yale University, Columbia University and the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as British universities including the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. Her words have appeared in All About History magazine, The Republic Journal, the French daily newspaper Libération and The Guardian. Prior to attending Yale, she earned an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, an M.A. in World History from King’s College London and a B.A. in History with High Honors from Wesleyan University.