Jeffrey Ahlman

Opinion | Africa Is Rising. The World Shouldn’t Turn Its Back.

Transcript and podcast. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...

Opinion | Africa Is Rising. The World Shouldn’t Turn Its Back.

I loved having this conversation with @hofrench.bsky.social about Africa's past, present and future, as well as Howard's brilliant new book about Kwame Nkrumah. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/o...

Congratulations @hofrench.bsky.social ! So well deserved!

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

🚨JOB ALERT🚨

We! Are! Hiring!

The Department of Africana Studies at Smith College invites applications for a tenure-track position in Black
Women’s Studies/Gender Studies at the rank of Assistant Professor, to begin 7/1/26

More info here: apply.interfolio.com/171572

#blackademia #academia #PhDSky

Why Area Studies Matters (opinion) If we are to save area studies programs, it will fall to universities to recognize their value, Amanda Lanzillo writes.

www.insidehighered.com/opinion/view...

Trump’s unfounded attack on Cyril Ramaphosa was an insult to all Africans | John Dramani Mahama If we want to solve injustices in Africa today, we cannot forget the injustices that shaped our shared history, says Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, 83, Dies; African Scholar Challenged the West He deconstructed what he called “the colonial library”: the accounts of Africa by Europeans whose aim, he said, was to further colonialism.

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/27/w...

New History Job Posted Today: Associate Professor (tenured) Public History/Associate Director of Slavery North Initiative | University of Massachusetts Amherst

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Liberian Question: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Tensions of a Black Republic | The Journal of African American History: Vol 110, No 1 Abstract During the 1920s and early 1930s, W.E.B. Du Bois regularly turned his attention to the question of Liberia and specifically to the fragility of Liberian sovereignty in the imperial world. The...

🎓 New article by Jeffrey Ahlman (@jeffahlman.bsky.social) on "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Liberian Question: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Tensions of a Black Republic"
www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...

My department at Smith College is hiring a one year VAP in Political Theory. Full time (2:3) and benefited position.

Specialization is open but particularly interested in candidates in either American Political Thought and/or Comparative Political Theory.

Apply here apply.interfolio.com/164854

This may not be as tragic as the devastation of PEPFAR, which has deprived AIDS patients of medications, but the elimination of the Title VI and Fulbright-Hays programs is a real loss for our country and the world.

www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10....
New article: "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Liberian Question: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Tensions of a Black Republic"

James Ferguson, a guiding light in the anthropology of southern Africa, has died.

His prose and analysis offered a model of clarity and insight. He was only 65. Very very sad.

**Today,** from noon-1pm (PST), UW African Studies hosts Bright Gyamfi @gyamfiphd.bsky.social for his virtual lecture “Embers of Pan-Africanism: Nkrumahist Intellectuals and Decolonization, 1960-1980.”

Registration link is below, hope you can make it!

Link: jsis.washington.edu/africa/event...

I like to think of it more as timeless.

It appeared in my queue this morning.

Thank you so much, @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social for giving me the opportunity to discuss THE IDEOLOGICAL SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA! @cornellupress.bsky.social You can listen to it here: newbooksnetwork.com/the-ideologi...

The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide|Hardcover One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Foreign Policy “Howard French’s The Second Emancipation stands the second half of the last century on its geopolitical head.” —Davi...

Very excited to share this news. My next book, The Second Emancipation, comes out in August, but if you want to buy it now through Barnes and Noble you can get 25% off today only by using PREORDER 25 at checkout. www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-second...

Congrats Howard! I look forward to it!

We’re hiring a tenured historian at UMass-Amherst in the Public Histories of North American Enslavement. Please circulate to anyone you think would be interested careers.umass.edu/amherst/en-u... 🗃️

Students who grew up with search engines might change STEM education forever Professors are struggling to teach Gen Z

As we kick off the first week of quarter, I am reminded that I my mental model is *absolutely* directory structure and I have no idea how students now live their entire lives in the chaotic laundry basket that is Google Drive. This article explains it so well: www.theverge.com/22684730/stu...

How Changes in K-12 Schooling Hampered the Preparation of College Students Accountability and test-based reforms, pandemic-era disruptions, and larger social and economic pressures have fostered ineffective habits.

www.chronicle.com/article/some...

11 books about urban Africa from 2024 Learn more about city life in Africa

open.substack.com/pub/thisweek...

Proofs Day.

Top Africa Stories of the Year 2024 December 27, 2024

open.substack.com/pub/thisweek...

Well, I'm sad we didn't get the full finish feed on that women's NCAA XC championship race. 😬

So excited to share that my book is nearly here. You can find it here tinyurl.com/yu6tkmrt for 40% off with the code 6AF24.

A hardback copy of Richard Rathbone, Murder and Politics in Colonial Ghana, the cover of which is red at the top fading to white at the bottom and features a photo of a West African sculpture of a human head, including the neck.

I heard yesterday the sad news of the death of Richard Rathbone, Professor Emeritus of African History at SOAS, London. He was so kind & intellectually generous, such a humane reader, & a hugely-respected historian of 20th-century #Ghana. I recommend his 1993 book published by Yale Uni Press. 👇