The Ghana Studies Association (GSA) began as the Akan Studies Council (ASC) in 1988. It is a multidisciplinary organization of scholars based in Africa, North America, Europe and Asia whose research focuses on the West African state of Ghana.
GSA aims to expand knowledge of the diverse histories and cultures of Ghana by supporting and celebrating high quality academic research, thoughtful and engaged teaching, and committed public outreach among an interdisciplinary community of scholars within Ghana and around the world.
Acting President – Bright Gyamfi
Bright Gyamfi is an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Gyamfi’s research sits at the intersection of West African and African Diaspora intellectual history, nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black internationalism, and economic development. He writes on African intellectuals who worked to transform and radicalize the study of Africa in academic and intellectual centers around the Atlantic. He has received research fellowships and grants from several organizations and institutions, including the NEH, the SSRC, Fulbright, the U.S. Department of State, the University of California, Northwestern University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Notre Dame. His work has appeared in the Journal of African American History, African Studies Review, Radical History Review, Africa is a Country, and The Conversation. He holds a BA in History (Honors) and Political Science from Notre Dame, an MSc in African Studies from Oxford, and a PhD in History from Northwestern. Before joining Rutgers, he was an Assistant Professor of History at UC San Diego and a Presidential Fellow at Northwestern.
In addition to his scholarly work, Gyamfi serves or has served on the board of the West African Research Association, the Oxford and Cambridge Society of Ghana, Grenada’s Institute for People’s Enlightenment, the African and African American Studies Research Center at UC San Diego, and the Global Black Thought.
Treasurer – 
Emmanuella Amoh
Dr. Emmanuella Amoh is a historian of Africa and the African Diaspora with a research interest that sits at the intersections of the Civil Rights Movement and Decolonization Movements. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of History at Baylor University, where she teaches History of Modern Africa, African Diaspora, and the United States in Global Perspective. Her general research interests include: Ghanaian & African American intellectual history, Black women & social movements, Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Postcolonial politics. She is the author of the award-winning article “The Dilemma of Diasporic Africans: Adger Emerson Player and Anti-Americanism in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana.” Some of her works have been published in the African Studies Review, Ghana Studies Journal, Journal of African American History, and American Historical Review.
Emmanuella can be reached at members.gsa@gmail.com
Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong – Journal Editor
Nana Yaw Boampong Sapong is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Ghana, Legon. He specializes in 18th to 21st century social history of West Africa, with reference to Ghana, labor, social movements, and university studies. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in African history, political and social movements, theory and methods, and historiography. Nana currently serves as chair of graduate studies at the Department of History, University of Ghana, Legon. He is also a creative writer and has written for the The ACU Review (Association of Commonwealth Universities).
Nana is a consultant and co-investigator on the project “Where Have the Workers Gone? Labour and Work in Ghana, 1951-2010,” which includes colleagues from the University of Ghana, University of Cambridge, University of Cape Coast, and Humboldt University zu Berlin, and was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) Partnership. His forthcoming publications include book chapters on women’s mobilization in Ghana (Cambridge University Press) and youth and Ghana’s political economy in the long twentieth century (Boydell and Brewer).
Nana Sapong is a lifetime member of the Ghana Studies Association and a co-editor of Ghana Studies journal.
Victoria Ellen Smith – Journal Editor
TBD
E. Sasu Kwame Sewordor – Newsletter Editor
Sasu Kwame Sewordor is a postdoc in Urban Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland), where he earned his doctorate. He is a global urban historian of 19th– and 20th–century West Africa, with a particular interest in Ghana. His works have appeared in multi-disciplinary journals including, African Studies Review, Canadian Journal of African Studies, Journal of West African History, African Economic History, and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,co-edited African History between Ghana and Switzerland: Essays Honouring Paul Jenkins (Basler Afrika Bibliographien Publishing House, 2024) and is currently working on his first book project titled “Colour of Gold: Race, infrastructure and the Urbanisation of Mining Hinterlands in Southern Colonial Ghana.”
His ongooing project builds on his award-winning article published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2022), titled “The Urban Culture of the ‘Model’ Christian Settlement at Abokobi, Ghana, 1854–1929.” It is a transatlantic architectural and urban history that traces the transfer of built utopian Christianised spaces between Germany and Ghana through the agency of the Swiss-led Basel Mission.
He brings rich experience to lead the revival of the Ghana Studies Association’s Newsletter, set to be published in the first quarter of 2026.
Tracy Mensah – Newsletter Editor
I earned a PhD in History from Georgetown University in 2023 and am a Ghana and US- trained historian of the African continent. Currently, I work as an Assistant Professor at Western Carolina University (Cullowhee, N.C) where I teach survey courses on early and modern Africa, thematic upper-level undergraduate courses like the African Diaspora, History of Sexuality in Africa, Special Topics in African History and Politics, and a graduate seminar in Global Urban History. My research interests in Indians and
postcolonial industrialization as well as food shortages in neoliberal Ghana have been published in the Journal of African Economic History and International Journal of African Historical Studies respectively. I live in Asheville, NC and dedicate my time outside of the classroom to community service. I am a proud member of the Carolina Mountain Club, the oldest and largest hiking and trail maintenance volunteer organization in the Southeastern United States. I balance my life as an academic with other fun activities such as cooking Ghanaian cuisine, baking, food photography, strength training, and swimming.
Advisory Board
Emmanuel Akyeampong (Harvard University)
Kwasi Ampene (Tufts University)
Nana Akua Anyidoho (University of Ghana)
George Bob-Milliar (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology)
Laurian Bowles (Davidson College)
Akosua Darkwah (University of Ghana)
Dennis Laumann (University of Memphis)
Carina Ray (University of Michigan)
Jesse W. Shipley (Dartmouth College)
Ben Talton (Howard University)
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Ghana Studies JOURNAL