Research &Publications
My research is not simply an intellectual exercise; it is and remains a deeply personal project. Here is an interview I conducted at the University of Oxford, where I spoke about what inspires my research.
Field Research Sites: Ghana, England, Senegal, Grenada, Trinidad & Tobago, Brazil, France, and Suriname
BOOK PROJECTS
Embers of Pan-Africanism: Nkrumahist Intellectuals and Decolonization, 1960-1980 (In Progress)
This book examines Ghanaian intellectuals who worked to transform and radicalize the study of Africa and its diaspora in academic and intellectual centers around the Atlantic. Drawing on rich archival research and oral histories across West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas, the book shows how exiled Ghanaian intellectuals helped reshape Black Studies, radical Pan-Africanism, and global anti-colonial thought. Rather than viewing Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow as an end-point, the book presents the period as one of intellectual expansion, diasporic exchange, and institution-building. My project breaks down the barriers between Black Studies and African Studies by recovering the dynamic history that links the study of Africa to the study of the diaspora. Thus, it makes significant scholarly contributions and interventions to the literature on pan-Africanism, migration, decolonization, and Black internationalism. My research also places the intellectual impact of Africans at the heart of current narratives of transnational encounters and connections rather than submit to the dominant scholarly and public focus on Africans as merely economic refugees.
In Search of African Development: Neo-Colonialism, United Nations, and the Making of Radical Pan-African Economic Institute, 1962–1980 (Second Book Project)
This project explores the work of Pan-African economists at IDEP (Institut Africain de Développement Economique et de Planification) in Dakar, Senegal. It centers Africans and African institutions within global development debates, analyzing how postcolonial African economists resisted neocolonial development paradigms while advancing alternative models rooted in African histories, economies, and politics.
PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES
“Uncovering Radical Histories: Anna Budu Arthur’s Everyday Politics of Decolonization and Transnational Solidarity,” Radical History Review, issue number 153, part of the collection on “Radical Histories of Decolonization.” (Forthcoming).
“The Africa-Diaspora Orbit: Anani Dzidzienyo’s Contributions to African/Black Studies and Black Liberation,” African Studies Review, 66, 2, (2023) 464-489. doi:10.1017/asr.2022.97 [top specialty journal for African Studies]
“From Nkrumah’s Black Star to the African Diaspora: Ghanaian Intellectual Activists and the Development of Black Studies,” Journal of African American History Special Issue on Reconceptualizing the History of Black Internationalism 106, 4 (2021), 682-705. [top specialty journal for African American History]
“Neo-Colonialism, Underdevelopment, and the Making of a Radical Pan-African Economic Institute” (revise & resubmit: Journal of African History)
BOOK CHAPTERS
“Discourses and Genealogies of Progress and Modernization in the Gold Coast and Ghana,” in Cambridge History of African Political Thought, ed. Jonathon Earle, Emma Hunter, Nana Osei-Opare, Harry Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar (Forthcoming, Cambridge University Press).
“In the Hallowed Halls: West African Students and the Question of Belonging at the University of Oxford,” in Race, Resistance and Belonging in The University: The Case of Oxford, ed. Patricia Daley, Michael Joseph, Yasmin Khan, and Stephen Tuck (Forthcoming, Bloomsbury).