Theology Department Faculty

Nelly Wamaitha is Assistant Professor of Theology and International Studies at Boston College. Her areas of research and interest are ethics, human rights, economic justice and international development, law and society, postcolonial theology, and critical theory.

Prior to her academic career Nelly worked as a lawyer in Nairobi, Kenya and in London. Before undertaking doctoral studies at Emory University, Nelly studied law at Duke University and the University of Nairobi and theological studies at the University of Oxford.

Her current project is a telling of a decolonial history of the law in Kenya.  It is focused on the role that the law and the Constitution played in creating inequalities in economic and political power between Kenya and its colonizers.

Her work is an attempt to understand how colonial logics have been transmitted across time and by so doing learn how colonial logics sustain themselves to produce new forms of colonialism today. It calls for theologies of history and of law that have the power to resist colonial power structures.