Nana Osei-Opare is a historian of African, international, and Cold War histories. Through the eyes of everyday people and the intellectual and political elite, Osei-Opare’s first book project, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (forthcoming with Cambridge), 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.

Osei-Opare coedited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Su Lin Lewis. It is available for free via Open Access. 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.

Osei-Opare is currently pursuing two future research projects and two coedited volumes. The first is a study of the socialist movement in Ghana’s fourth republic, from 1990s to the present day. The second is a history of the Convention People’s Party—from its rise as the vanguard of African and Black liberation in the middle of the 20^th century to its descent to near obscurity today. Moreover, he is coediting the Cambridge History of African Political Thought with Jonathon L. Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry N. K. Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar. And with Sunnie Rucker-Chang, coediting a special issue on Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Societies for the Slavic Review.

Osei-Opare has received teaching awards at UCLA and Fordham University. 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 very much welcomes inquiries from graduate students interested said histories. He is the founder and convener of the department’s Global & International History Seminar Series.

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).
 

Spring 2025 Courses:

HIST/AAAS 349: Black Life Behind the Iron Curtain

HIST/AAAS 223: Freedom and Struggle in Modern Africa
 

Fall 2025 Courses:

Hist/AAAS 248: Africa and the Global Cold War

AAAS 510: Intro to Diasporic Studies
 

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS

• Socialist De-Colony: Black and Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War (Forthcoming, CUP).
• (eds.) Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World: Envisioning Modernity in the Era of Decolonization (Bloomsbury, 2024), with Su Lin Lewis.

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.

CHAPTERS IN EDITED VOLUMES

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

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).
• Steven Friedman, Race, Class, and Power: Harold Wolpe and the Radical Critique of Apartheid in African Studies Quarterly, Vol. 16, Issue 3-4 (January 2017), pp. 193-195.
• Barry Gilder, Songs & Secrets: South Africa from Liberation to Governance, Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, Vol. 38, Issue 1 (December 2014), pp. 289-291.

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,.
• “Ghanaian Racial Citizenship in the Soviet Union and U.S., 1957-1966,” History: The Journal of the Historical Association, December 21, 2021.     
• “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. 
• “Terrorism and Racism, Twin Sisters?” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, Volume 39, Issue 1, January 2016, pp. 33-40.
• “Communism and the Tutelage of African Agency: Revisiting Mandela’s Communist Ties,” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies, Volume 38 (1) (December 2014), pp. 69-90.

WORKS-IN PROGRESS

• (eds.) Cambridge History of African Political Thought, coediting with Jonathan L. Earle, Emma Hunter, Harry N.K. Odamtten, and Ayesha Omar.
• Slavic Review - Special Issue on Blackness in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian societies, coediting with Sunnie Rucker-Chang.
• “Anti-imperialism and the Global Cold War,” in Routledge History of Communism, eds. Melissa Feinberg and Lisa A. Kirschenbaum (Routledge Press).