Mark Duerksen is a PhD candidate in African Studies with a primary field in African History. He is currently researching the politics and architecture of urban housing in Lagos within the context of the city’s massive transformation into Africa’s largest city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This project is part of a broader pursuit to utilize graphic and geospatial software to help scholars and planners better visualize and analyze the historic depth of Africa’s rapidly growing megacities. In addition to conducting field work and archival research in Nigeria and the U.K., for six months from 2016 to 2017 he will be in Cotonou, Benin studying Yoruba and French as a Boren Fellow.