The Ghana Studies Association (GSA) in collaboration with Africa is A Country is excited to announce the first in a series of digital scholarly panel conversations that showcase the most exciting rising scholars and new research. April 9, 2021 1-3pm EST/5-8pm GMT digital and format details to follow Rethinking Black Internationalism: New Directions in Historical…
Ato Quayson, GSA member and immediate Past President of the African Studies Association, has been selected by Brittle Paper as their ‘Academic of the Year’ for “his use of social media to bring scholarly ideas about literature to mainstream audiences” through his “Critic.Reading.Writing” Youtube channel, launched in July 2020. Professor Quayson has said that the…
In a piece on the online magazine, “Africa is a Country”, Jesse Weaver Shipley, Professor of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth University, reflects on the lessons we can learn from a 1970s political-cultural icon who dominated Ghanaian politics right through the 1980s and 1990s. Read more…
Jennifer Hart, Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University, is the winner of the 2020 Boahen-Wilks Article Prize! This is the citation from the Prize Selection Committee, presented by Nana Yaw Sapong during the ceremony at the (virtual) GSA Business Meeting on 22 December 2020: “For the 2020 prize, we received nominations from history,…
At this year’s GSA Business Meeting, convened online following the African Studies Association annual meeting (also held virtually, for the first time), members elected Professor Kwasi Ampene, an ethnomusicologist at University of Michigan, as the new President of GSA. Read Professor Ampene’s short statement below and his bio here. “It is with a deep sense…
About the prize The Boahen-Wilks Outstanding Scholarly Article Prize is awarded by the Ghana Studies Association to recognize scholarship that best exemplifies the rigor, innovation and interdisciplinary nature of Ghana Studies. The prize is named in honor of two pioneering scholars—Albert Adu Boahen and Ivor Wilks. The Boahen-Wilks Prize is open to journal articles and…
When Melania Trump donned a pith helmet on her 2018 trip to Kenya—one of four African countries she visited during her first official solo trip abroad—commentators pointed out that her choice to wear the colonial-era throwback was tone deaf and smacked of nostalgia for a time characterized not only by sartorial oddities, but by brutality…
If you are searching for intellectual content that (mostly) has nothing to do with Covid, subscribe to the YouTube channel Critic.Reading.Writing. The channel, created by GSA member and current President of the African Studies Association, Professor Ato Quayson, speaks to the relevance of humanities through an exploration of literature, as well as film, history and…
Nana Akua Anyidoho and Akosua Adomako Ampofo, GSA members at the University of Ghana, explain why the Public University Bill (PUB) currently before government is a rollback of the hard-won academic freedom that Ghanaian academies have enjoyed for decades now. It echoes the GSA statement on the PUB: that it is unconstitutional, unnecessary, and harmful…
Dr. Carina Ray, an associate professor of African and African-American Studies at Brandeis University and immediate past editor of Ghana Studies (the GSA journal), writes an opinion piece in the New York Times on grappling, in a very personal way, with the fact of and protests againt with police brutality in the US. Read the…
WE OPPOSE GHANA’S PUBLIC UNIVERSITY BILL [SIGNATURE CAMPAIGN] We, the undersigned, are scholars based in Ghana and all across the world who are horrified at the intention of the Ghanaian government to pass the Public University Bill. This draconian bill, which seeks to hand over control of tertiary education to the Executive Branch of the…