Ben Talton Photo

Ben Talton
Associate Professor of History
Temple University

 

I am an Associate Professor of History in the Department of History at Temple University. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at Hofstra University, and Visiting Senior Lecturer and Scholar-in-Resident at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Kumasi, Ghana. I hold a PhD from the University of Chicago and BA from Howard University. I am a past president of the Ghana Studies Association. Currently, I have the pleasure of being an editor of the peer-review journal African Studies Review.

My scholarship is centered on histories of local politics in West Africa and transnational social movements in Africa and the African diaspora. My publications include three books, Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave 2010); Black Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (Palgrave 2011), co-edited with Quincy Mills of the University of Maryland; and In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Penn Press 2019). I have also published numerous academic and online and in-print general audience articles and essays.

At Temple University, I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses on modern African history and the African diaspora, but my most frequent offerings are “History of the African Diaspora,” “Cold War Africa,” “Precolonial Africa,” and “Colonialism and Decolonization.”

I have served proudly on ASWAD’s executive board since 2015. I had the honor to be conference program co-chair, with Sonya Maria Johnson, for the 2017 biennial meeting in Seville, Spain, and I am currently chair of the prize committee. I have been a member of ASWAD since 2007.

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