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About Elisa Prosperetti
Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor (History) at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2026.NBN Episodes hosted by Elisa:
March 31, 2026
The Letter of the Law in J. E. Casely Hayford's West Africa
The African Gold Coast writer and statesman J. E. Casely Hayford (1866–1930) was a key figure in liberal anticolonial thought as well as African and B…
March 24, 2026
Socialist De-Colony
Led by the charismatic Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana won its political independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. It precipitated both the dying spiral of c…
February 28, 2026
Village Work
Most development histories focus on large-scale projects and multi-year plans. But how would we understand development differently if we chose a diffe…
February 9, 2026
Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982
Today I talked to Florian Wagner about his new book Colonial Internationalism and the Governmentality of Empire, 1893–1982 (Cambridge UP, 2022). From…
January 10, 2026
Ghana
Over the last two decades, historians have steadily moved away from writing longue durée national histories. Especially in the wake of the global hist…
December 6, 2025
An Unformed Map
In An Unformed Map: Geographies of Belonging Between Africa and the Caribbean (Duke UP, 2025), Philip Janzen traces the intellectual trajectories of C…
October 5, 2025
Remembering African Labor Migration to the Second World
This open access book is about Mozambicans and Angolans who migrated in state-sponsored schemes to East Germany in the late 1970s and throughout the 1…
November 16, 2024
Soldier's Paradise
In Soldier's Paradise: Militarism in Africa After Empire (Duke UP, 2024), Samuel Fury Childs Daly tells the story of how Africa’s military dictators t…
November 13, 2023
On the Scale of the World
On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought (U California Press, 2022) examines the reverberations of anticolonial ideas th…
August 19, 2023
A Language for the World
Morgan J. Robinson argues that the portability of Standard Swahili has contributed to its wide use not only across the African continent but also arou…
February 5, 2023
Inventing the Third World
What is the Third World? The term has essentially been scrubbed from our collective consciousness. What once used to be something concrete seems to ha…
January 10, 2023
Arrested Development
In the middle of the 20th century, there was a passionate affair, between the Soviet empire and newly independent West African states. It was a short,…
December 3, 2022
Decolonizing 1968
Decolonizing 1968: Transnational Student Activism in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar (Cornell UP, 2022) explores how activists in 1968 transformed university …
May 26, 2022
'Dignity of Labour' for African Leaders
The Prince of Wales College, Achimota School, opened in 1927 north of Accra in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Achimota was to be a ‘model’ school—but a model…
April 26, 2022
Amkoullel
“In Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns.” We’ve all heard this phrase, or some version of it, but not all of us know who uttered it. It was th…
September 24, 2021
Islamic Scholarship in Africa
In 1937, Shaykh Ibrahim Niasse, travelling to Mecca to make his first hajj, encountered Egyptian scholars who couldn’t fathom that Niasse’s erudition …
July 19, 2021
The OECD’s Historical Rise in Education
In 1961, it was famously declared that the “fight for education is too important to be left solely to the educators.” Enter the OECD. In The OECD’s Hi…
January 13, 2021
The Idea of Development in Africa
The Idea of Development in Africa: A History (Cambridge UP, 2020) challenges prevailing international development discourses about the continent, by t…
December 10, 2020
Powerful Frequencies
Marissa J. Moorman's book Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931–2002 (Ohio University Press, 2019) narrates Angol…
September 25, 2020
The Golden Rhinoceros
What are the African Middle Ages? A place, certainly, and a time period, evidently. But also a “documentary regime,” argues François-Xavier Fauvelle. …
August 5, 2020
Holding the World Together
“The most interesting women in the world!” That’s how Claire Robertson describes African women, and it’s hard to disagree with her after reading Holdi…
July 23, 2020
An Intimate Rebuke
What if the moral guardians of West African societies are postmenopausal women? This is the argument that Laura S. Grillo makes in her 2018 book, An I…
June 15, 2020
Beneath the Surface
By 2024, global sales of skin lighteners are projected to reach more than $30 billion. Despite the planetary scale of its use, skin lightening remains…