Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Rice University and an affiliated faculty member in the university's Center for African and African American Studies. He is an historian of African, international and Cold War histories. He is the author of Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (Cambridge University Press, November 2025), which tells a new history of Ghana’s Cold War, political-economic, and decolonization projects during the Kwame Nkrumah era by situating Ghana within larger Marxist, racial, and socialist debates and geographies. In addition, Socialist De-Colony showed how Ghana-Soviet spaces, Soviet ideas, and how race and racialization influenced, enabled, and disrupted Ghana's transformational socialist, Cold War, and decolonization projects to achieve Black freedom. The book received the 2026 Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Osei-Opare has pursued and continues to be interested in questions related to African political thought, international socialist ideas of postcolonial development, race and racialization, and the importance of local African actors and sites to global histories. In this vein, he coedited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. And with Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Osei-Opare coedited a special issue on “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies” in the Slavic Review (January 2026). Osei-Opare is currently working on a journal special issue with anthropologist Gökçe Günel on the topic of “Energy, Waste, and the Environment in West Africa.” In addition, Osei-Opare is co-editing the two-volume Cambridge History of African Political Thought and the Oxford Handbook of the History of Race in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia.

His work has appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, the Journal of African History, the Journal of West African History, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, among other places. He has also produced public-facing pieces in Slate Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy Magazine, and History: The Journal of the Historical Association.

Osei-Opare’s next book project, “Beyond the Myth,” is a major historiographic, historical and political corrective to the demise of the socialists in Ghana, socialist thought in Ghana, and Ghana’s links with the broader socialist world after the Western-inspired coup d’état in 1966 that ended Kwame Nkrumah’s socialist government. It seeks to return the socialist movement in Ghana and Ghana’s ties to the Eastern socialist world to the historiographic record from Nkrumah’s fall (1966) to the present.

Osei-Opare has received teaching awards at UCLA and Fordham University, respectively. He is excited to oversee undergraduate theses, one-on-one tutorials, and independent research projects with students interested in African, international, or Cold War history broadly construed. Osei-Opare also welcomes inquiries from graduate students interested in these histories.

Prior to joining Rice, Osei-Opare taught at Fordham (2019-2023). He was previously also a National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library (2023-2024) and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellow for Assistant Professors at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, School of Historical Studies (2022-2023). He is the founder and convener of the History Department’s Global & International History Seminar Series.

Graduate Students Supervising:

Moses Awinsong (Fall 2025-)
Mercy Dwomoh (Fall 2026-)
Sally Opoku (Fall 2026-)    

Fall 2026 Courses:

Hist/AAAS 349: Black Life Behind the Iron Curtain
Hist/AAAS 248: Africa and the Global Cold War 

Spring 2026 Courses:

HIST/AAAS 269: African Economies, Development, and Humanitarianism
FWIS 246: Apartheid South Africa 

BOOKS

Socialist De-Colony: Black and Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (Cambridge, Nov. 2025).

• Winner of the ASEEES 2026 Marshall D. Shulman Prize 

(eds.) Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024), with Su Lin Lewis.

JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUE

2025/2026. “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies,” Slavic Review, coedited with Sunnie Rucker-Chang.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

2023. “Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits,” Comparative Studies in Society and History.

• Finalist: 2024 Outstanding Article Prize for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora

2021. “‘If You Trouble a Hungry Snake, You Will Force It to Bite You’: Rethinking Postcolonial African Archival Pessimism, Worker Discontent, and Petition Writing in Ghana, 1957-66,” Journal of African History.

2019. “Uneasy Comrades: Postcolonial Statecraft, Race, and Citizenship, Ghana-Soviet Relations, 1957-1966,” Journal of West African History.  

CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES

2026. “Anti-imperialism, Neocolonialism, and the Global Cold War,” in Routledge History of Communism, eds. Melissa Feinberg and Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (Routledge Press, 2026): pp. 314-327.

2024. “Fish, Discontent, and Socialist Modernities and Dreams in Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana,” in Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024): pp. 215-236. 

SELECTED REVIEW ESSAYS, BOOK REVIEWS, & BOOK FORUMS

2025. “Into the Pantheon: ‘Who is the Enemy: What is Our Objective?,’” Sam Dubal, Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army (UC Press, 2018), Medical Anthropology Quarterly: International Journal for the Analysis of Health.

2024. Stephan F. Miescher, A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Indiana, 2023), African Studies Review.

2023. “Russia/USSR in the World,” Choi Chatterjee, Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach (Bloomsbury, 2022), Alessandro Iandolo, Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell, 2022), & Natalia Telepneva, Cold War Liberation: The Soviet Union and the Collapse of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, 1961-1975 (UNC Press, 2022), in The Russian Review.

2021. Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), History: Review of New Books.

2021. "The Quest for Scientific Equity in Postcolonial Ghana,” Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (Cambridge, 2019), Journal of African History.

2017. Steven Friedman, Race, Class, and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid in African Studies Quarterly.

2014. Barry Gilder, Songs & Secrets: South Africa from Liberation to Governance, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies.

2014. Carmela Garritano, African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History, African Studies Quarterly.  

SELECTED MEDIA/PUBLIC-FACING PUBLICATIONS

2025. “We’re Scholars of Who Study Africa. The Cybertruck Looks Kind of Familiar,” Slate Magazine, with Vivian Chenxue Lu.

2022. “Anti-Black racism is upending easy narratives about the exodus from Ukraine,” The Washington Post, with Thom Loyd.

2021. “Ghanaian Racial Citizenship in the Soviet Union and U.S., 1957-1966,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association.

2020. “When It Comes to America’s Race Issues, Russia Is a Bogeyman,” Foreign Policy Magazine.

2020. “Around the world, America has long been a symbol of antiblack racism,” The Washington Post.

2019. “Books that I Teach,” Black Agenda Report Book Forum.

2016. “Terrorism and Racism, Twin Sisters?” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies.

2014. “Communism and the Tutelage of African Agency: Revisiting Mandela’s Communist Ties,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies.