About
Biography
Dr. Patrick B. Litanga is a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 2000 and 2003, Dr. Litanga lived in South Africa as an asylum seeker; and in 2003 he was resettled in Lexington, Kentucky. Dr. Litanga has worked in refugee resettlement services for over 5 years in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Litanga brings his diverse personal experience, his professional engagement with refugees and immigrants’ communities, and his educational experience in classrooms and in research projects. Dr. Litanga’s interests include: post conflict reconstruction, African electoral politics, African social movements, and African Diasporas. His dissertation examined Les Combattants; a Congolese diaspora political protests movement that originated in Western Europe in the early 2000s. Some of Dr. Litanga’s writings have appeared in Aljazeera: What Next For the D R Congo After the Disputed Election?; Pambazuka News: “Why Dr. Denis Mukwege Should not join the DRC Politics,” 2015; and in The New Internationalist Magazine: “Democratic Republic of the Congo: An Electoral Cliffhanger,” March 2015 Issue. Dr. Litanga has taught American Government and Global Politics/World Politics/International Relations.
Ongoing Projects
Among other projects, Dr. Litanga is currently working on an article that proposes a social theory of Congolese Intellectuals with respect to the state, public power, and the masses. Dr. Litanga is also working on a book chapter, addressing the pragmatics of pursuing higher education among recently resettled young adult refugees from the African Great Lakes regions in Louisville, Kentucky. Finally, Dr. Litanga is completing a novel, provisionally titled, KinshasaAoût1998: UneTerreÉtagère. This novel depicts the challenges that inhabitants of Kinshasa, the capital city of the Congo, faced in August 1998 when the second civil war of the 1990s began.