Nana Osei-Opare is a historian of African, international, and Cold War histories. His first book, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (Cambridge, Nov. 2025), through the words of everyday people and the intellectual and political elite, 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. You can download the book for free via Open Access.

In addition, Osei-Opare coedited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. You can download the book for free via Open Access. With Sunnie Rucker-Chang, Osei-Opare most recently coedited a Journal Special Issue on “Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies” in the Slavic Review, Vol. 84, Issue 3 (January 2026). Furthermore, Osei-Opare has published articles 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. He has produced public-facing pieces in Slate Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy Magazine, and History: The Journal of the Historical Association.

His next book project will explore the shape and debates of the socialist movement in Ghana and Ghana’s ties to the Eastern socialist world from Nkrumah’s fall (1966) to the present. Furthermore, Osei-Opare is co-editing two edited volumes: (1) the two-volume Cambridge History of African Political Thought (under contract with Cambridge) with Jonathon L. Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry N. K. Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar; and (2) the Oxford Handbook of the History of Race in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia (under contract with Oxford with Eugene M. Avrutin, Sunnie Rucker-Chang, and Adrienne Edgar

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.

Spring 2026 Courses:

HIST|AAAS 269:    African Economies, Development, and Humanitarianism

FWIS 246:              Apartheid South Africa

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

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

(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

“Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies,” Slavic Review, Vol. 84, Issue 3 (January 2026), coedited with Sunnie Rucker-Chang.

PEER-REVIEWED ARTICLES

“Ghana and Nkrumah Revisited: Lenin, State Capitalism, and Black Marxist Orbits,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65:2 (April 2023), pp. 399-421.

Finalist: 2024 Outstanding Article Prize for the Association for the

Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora

“‘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 62:1 (May 2021), pp. 59-78.

“Uneasy Comrades: Postcolonial Statecraft, Race, and Citizenship, Ghana-Soviet Relations, 1957-1966,” Journal of West African History, 5(2) (Fall 2019), pp. 85-112.

WRITINGS IN EDITED VOLUMES & SPECIAL JOURNAL ISSUES

“Anti-imperialism, Neo-colonialism, and the Global Cold War: African Discourses,” in Routledge History of Communism, eds. Melissa Feinberg and Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (Routledge Press, Forthcoming 2026).

“Introduction: On Black Life and Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies,” Slavic Review, Vol. 84, Issue 3 (January 2026), w/ Sunnie Rucker-Chang, pp. 467-473.

“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 (2024), pp. 215-235.

“Introduction: Development Dreams from the Socialist South,” in Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (2024), w/ Su Lin Lewis, pp. 1-10.

SELECTED REVIEW ESSAYS, BOOK REVIEWS, & BOOK FORUMS

“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 (January 2025).

Stephan F. Miescher, A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana (Indiana, 2023), African Studies Review Vol. 67, Issue 4 (Dec. 2024), pp. 1051-52.

“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 (December 2023).

Marcello Musto, Another Marx: Early Manuscripts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), History: Review of New Books, Vol. 49, No. 5, (September 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, Vol. 62, Issue 1 (August 2021).

SELECTED MEDIA/PUBLIC FACING PUBLICATIONS

“We’re Scholars of Who Study Africa. The Cybertruck Looks Kind of Familiar,” Slate Magazine, March 14, 2025, with Vivian C. Lu.

“Anti-Black racism is upending easy narratives about the exodus from Ukraine,” The Washington Post, March 3, 2022, with Thom Loyd,.

“When It Comes to America’s Race Issues, Russia Is a Bogeyman,” Foreign Policy Magazine, July 6, 2020

“Around the world, America has long been a symbol of antiblack racism,” The Washington Post, June 5, 2020.

“Books that I Teach,” Black Agenda Report Book Forum, December 11, 2019. 

WORKS-IN PROGRESS

(eds.) The Oxford Handbook on the History of Race in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Eurasia (under contract, Oxford University Press), co-editing with Eugene Michael Avrutin, Sunnie Rucker-Chang, and Adrienne Edgar.

(eds.) Cambridge History of African Political Thought (under contract, Cambridge University Press), coediting with Jonathan L. Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry N.K. Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar.