Emmanuel K. Akyeampong, FGA
Emmanuel Akyeampong is Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He was appointed Loeb Harvard College Professor in July 2005.
Akyeampong is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (FGA), and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK). He serves as the president of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation (US), a partnership of academic researchers, African broadcasters and African producers dedicated to the production of development oriented programs for broadcast on television, radio and the Internet. He is a co-founder and director of the International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise (IIAS: www.interias.org.gh) based in Accra, Ghana. He served as chair of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard from July 2002 to June 2006.
He is the author of several books and articles including Drink, Power, and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c.1800 to Recent Times (1996); Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana, c.1850 to Recent Times (2001); and editor of Themes in West Africa’s History (2006); and with Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Dictionary of African Biography 6 Vols. (2012). His research interests are social history, comparative slavery and the African diaspora, environmental history, the history of disease and medicine, economic and business history. Akyeampong has been an editor of the Journal of African History (2006-2010), was founding co-editor of African Diaspora and has served on the editorial advisory boards of African Arguments, African Affairs, the International Journal of African Historical Studies, Journal of African History, Journal of the Social History of Medicine, Ghana Studies, the Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana, and Research Review. He was a member of the board of directors for the African Studies Association in the United States, and a former Council Member of the International African Institute.