Jeffrey Ahlman is the director of African Studies and an associate professor of History at Smith College, where he specializes in African political, social, and cultural history. He earned his BA in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and his MA and PhD in History from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the recipient of a number of grants and fellowships from organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Johns Hopkins University Center for Africana Studies, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the American Historical Association, and the West African Research Association.
His first book, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana, focuses on the transnational politics of pan-Africanism and global socialism in mid-twentieth-century Ghana and the popular reactions to it, particularly concerning issues of gender, generation, and work in the early postcolonial state. The book is part of Ohio University Press’s New African Histories series.
He is currently working on two book projects. The first project is a history of modern Ghana. Primarily focused on the mid-nineteenth century to the present, this book, currently titled Ghana: A Modern History, deviates from more conventional national histories of Ghana—as well as those of other countries—as it narrates the country’s relatively recent past through an interlocking set of political, social, cultural, and economic networks of belonging and self-identification.
His other current book-length project is a biography of Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. This biography foremost unpacks the historical processes that have shaped Nkrumah’s legacy in Ghana, Africa, and the global black community more broadly as well as those underpinning the ways in which his legacy has been deployed and contested in his lifetime and afterlife.
In addition to these larger projects, he has published essays on postcolonial Ghanaian state-citizenry relations, pan-Africanism, and African transnational networks in journals including the Journal of African History, Africa Today, Ghana Studies, Kronos: Southern African Histories, and the International Journal of African Historical Studies. He is also a member of the African Studies Association, American Historical Association, Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora, Ghana Studies Association, West African Research Association, and the Africa Network.
He is also available on Twitter @jeffrey_ahlman and can be emailed at jahlman at smith dot edu. He also maintains a profile at Academia.edu.
Jeffrey Ahlman, PhD 