Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies
Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

Professor Akyeampong joined the History faculty at Harvard upon receiving his Ph.D. in African History from the University of Virginia in 1993. He received his master's degree at Wake Forest University in North Carolina in 1989, where he concentrated on English labor history, and his bachelor's degree in History and Religions from the University of Ghana at Legon in 1984. 

Professor Akyeampong's publications include Themes in West Africa's History (2005), which he edited; Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, 1850 to Recent Times (2001); and Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Present Times (1996). He was a coeditor of The History of Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself and Other Writings, published this year, and provided an editor's note for Adu Boahen's Yaa Asantewaa and the Asante-British War of 1900-01.

Professor Akyeampong has been awarded several research fellowships, and from 1993 to 1994, he was the Zora Neale Hurston Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at Northwestern University. He was named a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2002, and was nominated to be a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1998, Professor Akyeampong delivered the Distinguished Africanist Address at Boston College, entitled "Ghana: Reflections on 40 Years of Independence." At the University of Minnesota at Morris the following year, he gave the 14th Annual O. Truman Driggs Distinguished Lecture, "History, Memory, Slave Trade and Slavery in Anlo, Ghana." He was interviewed on National Public Radio's "The World" in March of 1998, to discuss President William J. Clinton's trip to Africa. In keeping with the cross-cultural nature of much of his work, Professor Akyeampong has presented papers at conferences around the world, including the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, in August 2001, and the Conference on Dutch-Ghanaian Relations: Past and Present, at the Hague in November 2001.

At Harvard, Professor Akyeampong is the faculty associate for the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and a board member of the Du Bois Institute. As a former chair of the Committee on African Studies, he has been instrumental, along with Professor Gates, in creating the Department of African and African American Studies.

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Contact Information

Center for Government and
International Studies
CGIS South Bldg. S433
Cambridge, MA 02138
Fax: (617) 496-0621
p: (617) 496-5755

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