Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

The Rev. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

Minister for Worship and Formation in the Memorial Church
Ellen Gurney Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies
Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies
The Rev. Dr. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong

Emmanuel Akyeampong is the Ellen Gurney Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and the Oppenheimer Faculty Director for the Center for African Studies. He was appointed a Loeb Harvard College Professor from July 2005 through June 2010.

Akyeampong is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (FGA), and a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK). He sits on the Advisory Council of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellows Program. Akyeampong 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 of the International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise based in Accra, Ghana, and also served as chair of the Committee on African Studies at Harvard from July 2002 to June 2006.

He is the author and editor 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); with Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Dictionary of African Biography 6 Vols. (2012); and with Alan G. Hill and Arthur Kleinman, The Culture of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Practice in Africa (2015).

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. Akyeampong holds a Masters in Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School (2014), and is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.

People terms