Department of History

Personal Statement:

I am a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. While my first book, Making Men in Ghana, explored the history of masculinities in Ghana by foregrounding the life histories of eight men, my new monograph, A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana, is a history of Ghana’s largest development project, the Akosombo Dam, completed in 1965. A Dam for Africa is accompanied by the documentary film Ghana’s Electric Dreams (dir. R. Lane Clark). I am currently embarking on a new book project about the ecologies and infrastructures of Ghana’s Volta Lake. In addition, I remain curious in and engaged with historical questions about gender, sexualities, development and technology, Africa’s environments,  and the practice of oral history in Africa and beyond.

Advisor to:

• Christabel Agyeiwaa
• Claudia Ankrah
• Raymok Ketema
• Ryan Minor
• kwabena agyare yeboah (Gideon Yeboah Agyare)

Current Projects:

Ghana’s Inland Ocean: Ecologies and Infrastructures of the Volta Lake

A monograph that explores the history of Ghana’s vast man-made lake by exploring its changing ecology, scientific knowledge production, fishing industry, and transport.

Selected Publications:

Monographs

• Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2022)
• Making Men in Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2005)

Documentary Film

• Ghana’s Electric Dreams (La-La Productions, 2019, 124′), a film by R. Lane Clark and Stephan F. Miescher. This documentary film is directed and edited by R. Lane Clark, based on research by Stephan F. Miescher and R. Lane Clark, and produced by R. Lane Clark, Stephan F. Miescher, and France Winddance Twine

Edited Volumes/Special Journal Issues

• Stream (special issue) “Energy Justice in Global Perspective,” co-edited with Javiera Barandiarán, Mona Damluji, David Pellow, and Janet Walker, Media+Environment 4, issue 1 (2022)
• Gender Imperialism and Global Exchanges, co-edited with Michele Mitchell and Naoko Shibusawa (Wiley Blackwell, 2015)
• Modernization as Spectacle in Africa, co-edited with Peter J. Bloom and Takyiwaa Manuh (Indiana University Press, 2014)
• Special Issue “Revisiting Modernization,” Ghana Studies 12/13 (2009/2010), co-edited with Peter J. Bloom and Takyiwaa Manuh
• Africa After Gender?, co-edited with Catherine M. Cole and Takyiwaa Manuh (Indiana University Press, 2007)
• Men and Masculinities in Africa, co-edited with Lisa A. Lindsay (Heinemann, 2003)
• African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, co-edited with Luise White and David William Cohen (Indiana University Press, 2001)
• Männergeschichten: Schwule in Basel seit 1930, co-edited with Kuno Trüeb (Buchverlag Basler Zeitung, 1988)

Selected Articles and Book Chapters

• “Ghana’s Akosombo Dam, Volta Lake Fisheries & Climate Change,” Daedalus 150, no. 4 (2021): 124-42
• “Masculinities,” in A Companion to African History, ed. William H. Worger, Charles Ambler, and Nwando Achebe (Chichester, Sussex, Wiley Blackwell, 2019), 35-58
• “‘Bringing Fabrics to Life’: Akosombo Textiles Limited of Ghana,” in African-Print Fashion Now!: A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style, ed. Suzanne Gott et al. (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum, 2017), 87-95
• “The Akosombo Dam and the Quest for Rural Electrification in Ghana,” in Electric Worlds/Mondes électriques: Creations, Circulations, Tensions, Transitions (19th-21st C.), ed. Alain Beltran et al. (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2016), 317-42
• “‘Nkrumah’s Baby’: The Akosombo Dam and the Dream of Development in Ghana,” Water History 6, no. 4 (2014), 341-66
• “Building the City of the Future: Visions and Experinces of Modernity in Ghana’s Akosombo Township,” Journal of African History 53, no. 3 (2012), 367-90
• “Hydro-Power and the Promise of Modernity and Development in Ghana: Comparing the Akosombo and Bui Dam Projects,” Ghana Studies 12/13 (2009/2010), 55-75, with Dzozi Tsikata
• “Masculinities, Intersectionality, and Collaborative Approaches,” Men and Masculinities 11, no. 2 (2008), 227-33
• “From Pato to Parlor: Domesticity, Masculinity, Religious Space, and Alternative Archives in 20th Century Ghana,” Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte and vergleichende Geschichtsforschung 17, nos. 5/6 (2007), 131-45
• “‘My Own Life’: A. K. Boakye Yiadom’s Autobiography—Writing and Subjectivity of a Ghanaian Teacher-Catechist,” in: Africa’s Hidden Histories: Person, Text, and the Colonial State, ed. Karin Barber (Indiana University Press, 2006), 27-51
• “The Challenges of Presbyterian Masculinity in Colonial Ghana,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, New Series, no. 9 (2005), 75-10
• “Been-to Visions: Transnational Linkages among a Ghanaian Dispersed Community in the Twentieth Century,” Ghana Studies 2 (1999), 57-76, with Leslie Ashbaugh
• “Of Documents and Litigants: Disputes on Inheritance in Abetifi — A Town of Colonial Ghana,”Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 39 (1997), 81-119

Honors and Professional Activities:

Co-Convener, Andrew F. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures entitled “Energy Justice in Global Perspective,” 2017-2019

Co-Editor, Ghana Studies Journal, 2008-2013

Co-Director, University of California African Studies Multi-Campus Research Group, 2008-2012

UC President’s Fellowship in the Humanities, 2010-2011

American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship, 2007-2008