Conference paper prize

Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Presented at the GSA Triennial Conference

At the July 2019 conference held in Accra, the GSA instituted a prize for the Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Presented at the GSA Triennial Conference.  The prize is meant to recognize, encourage and support scholarship by younger researchers. The selected paper will be eligible for consideration for review and publication in Ghana Studies, a process through which the award winner will be mentored by senior scholars.

Eligibility: Any sole-authored paper (of not more than 8,000 words) accepted for and presented at the GSA conference by a graduate student, a post-doctoral researcher, or early career scholar within three years of the award of a doctorate degree.

The inaugural prize winner was publicly announced at the GSA Business Meeting during the African Studies Association annual conference in Boston in November 2019.

Bright Gyamfi, inaugural winner of the GSA Conference Paper Prize

GSA Business Meeting, Boston 2019

Bright Gyamfi (in middle) with friends/GSA members

GSA awarded the 2019 Best Paper by an Emerging Scholar Presented at the GSA Triennial Conference to Bright Gyami, a PhD student at Northwestern University.

Bright presented his paper, “From Nkrumah’s Ghana to the African Diaspora: Ghanaian Intellectual Activists and Black Studies, 1966 to 1980s“, at the 3rd Triennial Conference of the GSA which was held in July 2019 in Accra.

Bright’s paper investigates the intellectual careers of Ghanaian scholars/activists in the aftermath of the 1966 coup. The particular strength of the paper is the way in which it centers a radical Ghanaian political movement in a broader transnational diasporic movement connecting the United States, Latin America, and Ghana. This essay exemplifies the potential of intellectual history as a field.

The paper turns the spotlight on a group of scholars whose contributions to Black Studies have been relatively neglected. It is timely also given renewed interest in the work of William Abraham (as evident in Sub-Saharan Publisher’s republication of William Abraham’s The Mind of Africa).   This paper is also a welcome addition to histories of Ghanaians outside the borders of Ghana.

The  editors of Ghana Studies, will work with Bright Gyamfi to develop his conference paper for the GSA journal.

Congratulations, Bright!