It is with heavy hearts that the Harvard Center for African Studies, and indeed, the entire Harvard community, reflects on the memory of Jennifer Ward Oppenheimer (AB ’89, JD ’93), who passed away on Tuesday, May 16th.

Jennifer was a zealous supporter of educational...

Obenewa Amponsah will lead operations for the Harvard University Center for African Studies office in Johannesburg, South Africa.

... Read more about Harvard University Center for African Studies Appoints New Executive Director for Inaugural Office in Africa

We are pleased to announce the appointment of Professor Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong as the new Oppenheimer Faculty Director of the Harvard University Center for African Studies effective July 1, 2016.

Akyeampong, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, is the senior historian of Africa at Harvard, and specializes in West African history, Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, comparative slavery, social history of alcohol, disease and medicine, ecology, the African diaspora, political economy and trade, and social and cultural history. He is the author of Drink, Power,...

The Center for African Studies is delighted to welcome Professor Achille Mbembe as the Center’s Spring 2016 visiting Senior Research Fellow. A major figure not only in the fields of African history, politics, and social science, Mbembe is widely regarded as one of the most important public intellectuals writing about contemporary African and global phenomena in the world today.

Mbembe’s influential On the Postcolony was published in English in 2001, followed by On Private Indirect Government (State of the Literature), 2002, Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l...