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About Afua Baafi Quarshie
I grew up in Accra, Ghana, and moved to the United States in 2004 to attend college. I graduated from Carson-Newman University with a B.A. in Political Science, with minors in History and Women's Studies and went on to obtain an M.A. in International Affairs from the American University. After six years at the U.S. Department of State, I moved to Minnesota and worked at the University of Minnesota for five years.
I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at the Johns Hopkins University. My research focuses on women's histories and lives in post-independence Ghana. Specifically, my dissertation explores how mothering in post-independence Ghana was shaped by economic and political crises amid the stuttering rise of neoliberal ideas and processes, spread through state, private, and international institutions concentrated in urban areas.
NBN Episodes hosted by Afua:
March 15, 2026
Negotiating Power and Inequality in Ghana
In Ghana, much as in other parts of the Global South, postcolonial leaders aimed for industrial growth through the establishment of affordable hydroel…
November 15, 2025
The Bonds of Kinship in Dahomey
From the 1720s to the 1940s, parents in the kingdom and later colony of Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) developed and sustained the common practic…
October 16, 2025
Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda
Virus Research in Twentieth-Century Uganda: Between Local and Global (Ohio UP, 2024) presents the stories of scientists at the Uganda Virus Research I…
September 21, 2025
Preparing the Modern Meal
Preparing the Modern Meal: Urban Capitalism and Working-Class Food in Kenya's Port City (Ohio UP, 2025) is an urban history that connects town and cou…
July 14, 2025
Between Feast Famine
Ghana’s twentieth century was one of dramatic political, economic, and environmental change. Sparked initially by the impositions of colonial rule, th…
June 19, 2025
Independent Africa
Independent Africa: The First Generation of Nation Builders (Indiana UP, 2023)explores Africa's political economy in the first two full decades of ind…
May 17, 2025
The Texture of Change
The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning, and History in Western Africa, 1700 – 1850 (Ohio UP, 2024) examines historical change across a broad re…
April 23, 2025
Market Encounters
In Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Ohio UP, 2017), Bianca Murillo explores the shifting social terrains that made the…