As always, GSA was very present and active in the 60th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association from 16-18 November in Chicago, which coincided with Ghana’s 60th independence anniversary. Here a few highlights, in words and pictures: Carina Ray was awarded the 2017 Women’s Caucus Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize for Crossing the Color Line: Race,…
Dr. Phidelia Theresa Doegah is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Health Research (IHR) at the University of Health and Allied Sciences (UHAS), with a background in Population Studies. Her research titled “Lifestyle Behaviours and its implications on Body Mass Index” takes off from the fact that, while non-communicable diseases usually emerge in middle…
The President of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS) has the pleasure to invite members of the University community to an Inaugural Lecture by Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo, former Director, Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, as follows: Topic: Who are we and whose are we? Identity and Transforming the Nation…
GSA member and winner of last year’s Boahen-Wilks Article Prize, Ebony Coletu, has been named a Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar for 2017. In a nation-wide search conducted by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Ebony was selected to be one of 10 Malkiel scholars. This award acknowledges and further supports Ebony’s work as a scholar…
Sandra Greene’s new book, Slave Owners of West Africa: Decision-Making in the Age of Abolition (Indiana University Press, 2017), is featured in a write up about her research.
Ghana Studies Association is in the ASA News (Summer 2017). The newsletter highlights the activities and achievement of GSA and its members. Read the article here.
The Executive Board of the African Studies Association has selected Benjamin N. Lawrance as the new Editor-in-Chief of the Africa Studies Review. Joining him as Editorial Board members are two other GSA members: Akosua Adomako Ampofo and Ben Talton. “Dr. Lawrance is a prize-winning historian of social justice who studies comparative historical and contemporary slavery,…
The Nkonya-Alavanyo Land Dispute in Ghana: Land Struggle, Power and the Challenges of Belonging focuses on the 100-year old land dispute between the two ethnic communities of Nkonya and Alavanyo in the Volta region of Ghana, who have engaged in intermarriages and other interactive social activities for over 300 years, until the land dispute emerged…
Ambassador Laudemar Goncalves de Aguiar Neto, Charge d’Affaires, Brazilian Embassy in Ghana invited Professor Kwame Essien to launch his book Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana: The Tabom, Slavery, Dissonance of Memory, Identity, and Locating Home at the Brazilian Embassy in Accra, Ghana. The book is about ex-slaves from Brazil and how they resettled in Gã Mãŋ, Accra from the 1820s after…
At last, the GSA’s Year in Review (2016) is finally here! Viewing our many accomplishments from the distance that February affords makes them appear all the more impressive! GSA members have published new books and innovative articles in leading journals, while also editing a dynamic range of special issues and edited collections. Our brilliance and…
‘A few days after the December 2016 elections in Ghana, a cartoon appeared in Uganda’s Sunday Monitor depicting a civics lesson in a classroom where the teacher asked the question: What is democracy? The response from the pupils was “Ghana.”’ So begins Audrey Gadzekpo’s overview of the 2016 elections in Ghana – ‘Consolidating Democracy in Ghana’ – in…
The GSA Boahen-Wilks Article Prize recognizes and highlights scholarship on Ghana that demonstrates rigor, innovation, and dynamism. For the 2016 prize, we received a total of 11 submissions that included both self-nominations and a few external nominations. We were pleased to receive papers from history, anthropology, art history, sociology, political science, international relations and safety…
“A Donald Trump presidency has grave implications for US relations with Africa. His meteoric political ascension ushers in an era of right-wing domestic extremism and international disregard…” Read the rest of this article titled “Trump’s rise: African-American politicians must lead on Africa’s affairs” on The Conversation.
Carina Ray is to be awarded the Wesley-Logan Prize in African Diaspora History by the American Historical Association (AHA) for her book Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio Univ. Press, 2015). “The AHA offers annual prizes honoring exceptional books, distinguished teaching and mentoring in the classroom,…
GSA Treasurer Kwame Essien’s Brazilian-African Diaspora in Ghana: The Tabom, Slavery, Dissonance of Memory, Identity, and Locating Home is available for pre-order on Amazon and Google Books. See details and description here. Acclaim for the book “This study of the Tabom is a long-awaited contribution by Kwame Essien to the literature on the African returnees from…
This year’s GSA Research Grant program was the most competitive yet, with 18 applications from University of Ghana, University of Cape Coast, and the University of Development Studies. GSA thanks reviewers David Owusu-Ansah, Rebecca Shumway, Lloyd Amoah, Gretchen Bauer, Cyrelene Amoah-Boampong and Nana Akua Anyidoho. Here are the winners: Joana Kwabena-Adade is a PhD candidate…
GSA’s own Jean Allman is the Vice President-elect of the African Studies Association, of which the Ghana Studies Association is an international affiliate. Congratulations, Jean!
Phil Bartle, who died on November 6, 2015 after a prolonged period of poor health, wrote an impressive but little known sociological dissertation, an ethnography about the Kwahu town of Obo. He first came to Ghana in 1965 as a Canadian (CUSO) volunteer to teach economics and mathematics at St Peter’s Secondary School in Kwahu-Nkwatia.…
Manu Herbstein, GSA member and independent write and scholar, is winner of the ALA 2016 Book of the Year Award (Creative Writing) for his novel The Boy Who Spat in the Sargrenti’s Eye. He received the award at the African Literature Association’s Awards Ceremony in Atlanta on 9 April 2016. His first novel, Ama, A…
This conversation between our very own Carina Ray and Dan Magaziner is excellent. Read it here (and subscribe to the blog Africa is a Country for a steady diet of thought-provoking articles on everything Africa, including from GSA members).
Ato Quayson takes on “The Revenant” and Hollywood’s predilection for glorifying colonial conquest in The Guardian. Check it out here.
The Ghana Reader: History, Culture, Politics Kwasi Konadu and Clifford C. Campbell, editors Covering 500 years of Ghana’s history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast’s importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana’s brief period…
[First posted on the GSA Facebook page on 2 January. Compiled by Carina Ray. Note: This list is based on members’ response to the call to submit articles, books, awards, etc.] 2015 was an incredibly productive year for GSA members. Here’s a look back at some of what we accomplished. New Books Akosua Adomako Ampofo…
David Owusu-Ansah’s 2013 co-authored book Islamic Learning, the State and the Challenges of Education in Ghana presents a comprehensive historical study of the interaction of Islamic education with educational policy in Ghana. It is based on rich analyses of documents, interviews and statistical data. The data from the study is available through the free-access digital…
HIGHLIGHTS: Akosua Adomako Ampofo delivers the African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture. Abena Osseo-Asare wins the 2015 Herskovitz prize for Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa! Jean Allman wins GSA’s own 2015 Boahen-Wilks Scholarly Article Prize. Carola Lentz has a panel to celebrate her 2014 Herskovitz-winning book, Land, Mobility and Belonging in West…
GSA is delighted to announce that, for the second year in a row, a GSA member has won the African Studies Association’s prestigious Melville J. Herskovitz given to “the author of the most important scholarly work in African studies published in English during the preceding year”. Previous winners of the prize have included prominent names…
GSA is proud to announce that the inaugural Boahen-Wilks Article Prize has been awarded to Jean Allman for her brilliant article “Phantoms of the Archive: Kwame Nkrumah, A Nazi Pilot Named Hanna, and the Contingencies of Postcolonial History-Writing,” which appeared in The American Historical Review in 2013. In “Phantoms of the Archive” Allman takes the…
GSA is happy to bask in the reflected glory of Carola Lentz’s win of the prestigious Melville J. Herskovits Award (2014) for her book Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa (Indiana University Press). The Herkovits prize is awarded to the author of outstanding original scholarly work published on Africa in the previous year. The…
Patience Gyamenah is an MPhil student and a graduate assistant at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, where she is completing a dissertation in Anthropology of Health, focusing on the relationship between cultural beliefs on illness causation and health-seeking behaviours. Patience’s research in “Culture and healthcare pluralism among Akan cancer…
Witchcraft violence is a feature of many contemporary African societies. In Ghana, belief in witchcraft and the malignant activities of putative witches is prevalent; purported witches are blamed for all manner of adversities including inexplicable illnesses and untimely deaths. As in other historical periods and other societies, in contemporary Ghana, alleged witches are typically female,…
GLOBAL GHANA Ghana Studies Association Conference Cape Coast 2016 6-9 July 2016 The Ghana Studies Association welcomes paper and panel proposals for its second triennial conference to be held in Cape Coast, Ghana, 6-9 July 2016 to be held at University of Cape Coast. This interdisciplinary gathering of local and international students and scholars of Ghana’s…
I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) of the University of Ghana, where I have worked for nine years. My primary responsibilities at ISSER are to conduct social policy research and to teach graduate level courses in Development Studies. I have a BA in Psychology…
By Joseph Oduro-Frimpong (Ashesi University, Department of Arts and Sciences) When I was asked to write a short piece for this forum, my initial intention, of course, was to use the opportunity to flesh out and test some preliminary ideas related to my current research on Ghanaian popular media. Instead, I have decided to propose to fellow…
Harcourt Fuller, of Georgia State University’s Department of History, has a forthcoming book, Building the Ghanaian Nation-State: Kwame Nkrumah’s Symbolic Nationalism. This is the description from the book: As the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to gain independence from a European imperial power, Ghana has always occupied a position of primacy in the African…
By Jean Allman On October 7th, 2014, Northwestern University Professor Emeritus Ivor G.H. Wilks passed away at the home he shared with his wife, Nancy Lawler, in the west of his beloved Wales. A prolific author, meticulous researcher, and a teacher of boundless generosity, Professor Wilks is best known for his foundational texts on the…
Naaborko Sackeyfio-Lenoch’s new book, The Politics of Chieftaincy examines debates over authority and property in Accra, Ghana, during the peak decades of British colonial rule. Between 1920 and 1950, imperial policies marginalized educated elites, local authorities, and landowners in favor of Ga chiefs, whom the British authorities viewed as more loyal to the empire. Conflicts erupted throughout…
2013 Research Grant Report, by Joseph Darko (2013 Grantee) I can still remember my face beaming with smiles when I read through the email notifying me of the grant I had been given by the Ghana Studies Association. In the 2011/2012 academic year, I enrolled on an MPhil Programme in Statistics at the University of…
NEW BOOK Letters from Ghana 1968-1970: A Peace Corps Chronicle has been published by Peace Corps Worldwide (2013). The book is compiled and edited by Jon Thiem, Professor Emeritus of English at Colorado State University. From 1968 to 1970, Thiem was a Peace Corps English teacher in Acherensua, Brong Ahafo Region. Every two weeks, he sent…
GSA mourns the loss of a literary hero, Prof. Kofi Awoonor, who was among those killed at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Kenya. We are grateful for his wisdom so beautifully conveyed through his words. KOFI AWOONOR, 1935-2013
Anne V. Adams, ed., Essays in Honour of Ama Ata Aidoo at 70 (Oxford: Ayebia, 2012). Amazon link here
Download the final program here FINAL PROGRAM
By Ifetayo M. Flannery (Temple University) September 13, 2013 Just as the summer began to unfold in May of 2013, the first Ghana Studies Association Conference was convening. I was unaware that this conference would become the highlight of the season. From great lengths, students and scholars gathered in Kumasi. By way of age, geography,…
By Carly Goodman (Temple University) September 9, 2013 I was nearing the end of five months of living in Ghana when I started to get more frequent emails from Ben Talton. He had done a tremendous amount of planning from the States for the first ever Ghana Studies…
By Manu Herbstein The past year has seen a modest revival of literary activity in Accra, best symbolized perhaps by the active participation of President John Dramani Mahama in the second annual Ghana Association of Writers Book Festival held in the lobby of the National Theatre on Founders’ Day 21st September, 2012. President Mahama, who is…
By Gracia Clark (Indiana University) Professor Clark, right, in Kumasi I was fortunate in 2011 to participate in two group research projects, which enabled me to spend nine months in Kumasi. In the fall I wrapped up work on an NEH grant originating with Michigan State historian David Robinson preparing materials for a series of web…