Biography
I gained my first degree in Modern History from Oxford University, and took a Masters at the Universite de Paris I (Pantheon-La Sorbonne), where I studied the personalities, principles and practices associated with late colonial development in Tanganyika. I joined DASA as a PhD student, writing my thesis on the nature of African political activism on the Ghana-Togo border from the 1950s to present-day. After working as Africa Editor at a news analysis company, I returned to DASA to take up a Nuffield Foundation New Career Development Fellowship with Lynne Brydon. This project investigated the history and present-day provision of adult education in Ghana, focusing on the relationship between mass literacy, citizenship and civil society (see articles listed below). I was appointed as a lecturer in 2007.
Teaching
I teach undergraduate courses on the History of Africa and its Diasporas, including:
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Introduction to African History
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The Social History of Sub-Saharan Africa
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Atlantic Slavery
Postgraduate supervision
Current graduate students are working on the history of education in Ghana and on health education in Tanzania. I am interested in supervising projects relating to the social and political histories of modern and contemporary Ghana and Togo. I also welcome proposals relating to political activism, propaganda, print culture, mass literacy and education in other African countries.
Research
I am now working on a book project which is supported by a British Academy small research grant. This will be a historical ethnography, combining the life histories of a cohort of rural political activists with a close study of the African (Ewe) language propaganda that circulated along the Ghana-Togo border area before and after Independence. These sources are an essential corrective to governmental archives and the urban-based press, enabling us to understand the creative work carried out by rural activists, and to examine issues of legitimacy, spokesmanship and mass mobilization in rural areas during the late colonial and post-colonial period.
Publications
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2011 ‘Who knew the minds of the people? Specialist knowledge and developmentalist authoritarianism in post-colonial Ghana’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39/2.
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2010 ‘Local historians and strangers with big eyes: the politics of Ewe history in Ghana and its global diaspora’, History in Africa 37.
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2010 ‘From Pentecostalism to Politics: mass literacy and community development in late colonial Northern Ghana’, Paedagogica Historica 46/3.
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2009 ‘Modernity and Danger: the Boy Kumasenu and the work of the Gold Coast Film Unit’, Ghana Studies 12 (co-written with Peter Bloom).
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2009 “It brought some kind of neatness to mankind”: literacy, development and democracy in 1950s Asante’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 79/4.
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2007 "Reading, Writing and Rallies: The Politics of 'Freedom' in Southern British Togoland, 1953-6", Journal of African History 48/1.
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2007 "Agency and Analogy in African history: the contribution of extra-mural studies in Ghana’", History in Africa 34.
Book reviews
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Dec 2010. English Historical Review. Review of: Ending British Rule in Africa: writers in a common cause, by Carol Polsgrove.
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July 2008. Journal of African History. Review of: Locality, Mobility and ‘Nation’: periurban colonialism in Togo’s Eweland 1900-1960, by Benjamin Lawrance
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June 2007. English Historical Review. Review of: Black Experience and the Empire, edited by Philip Morgan and Sean Hawkins.