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About Elisa Prosperetti
Elisa Prosperetti is an Assistant Professor in International History at the National Institute of Education in Singapore. Her research focuses on the connected histories of education and development in postcolonial West Africa. Contact her at here.
NBN Episodes hosted by Elisa:
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…
March 27, 2024
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…
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 …
July 7, 2022
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…
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 …
August 12, 2021
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…
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…