Nmesoma Joy Bernard is a second-year Ph.D. student, with research interests in Women and Gender Studies, African history, and war memory. Her dissertation centers on the social and cultural impacts of the Nigeria-Biafra civil war in Southeastern Nigeria, focusing on how socially excluded women navigate memory, trauma, and social belonging in the aftermath of war. Her research will explore wartime survival strategies adopted by women such as intimate relationships with soldiers and wartime sexual exploitations that shaped women’s postwar experiences and the generational transfer of the trauma and memory. By centering personal narratives from people affected by post-war exclusions, her research will recover silenced voices and examines the ways these women and their children negotiate belonging, social stigma, and historical memory. From Nigeria, Nmesoma earned her undergraduate degree in History at the University of Nigeria.