Join us for our in-person African Studies Workshop! The workshop series is a scholarly space for Africa-centered research, offering a diverse range of topics and scholarly backgrounds to explore historical and current conditions.
MARCH 30: BOOK PROJECT
Speaker: Alison Okuda, Associate Professor of History at Worcester State University.
Title: “New Accra in New England: Migration and Ghanaian Foodways in Worcester.”
Discussant: Carla Martin, Lecturer and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies in African and African American Studies at Harvard University
Bio: Dr. Alison Okuda is Associate Professor of History at Worcester State University. She was awarded the 2024 Outstanding Article Prize by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora for her article, “Black Power, Raw Soul, and Race in Ghana,” published in the African Studies Review. She has published research on Ghanaian musical exchanges in London in Ghana Studies journal and on popular music and respectability politics in Accra in African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal. Her first book, Pan-African Resonance: Music, Migration, and Everyday Practice in London and Accra, shows how Ghanaian and Caribbean music-makers and listeners practiced pan-Africanism through quotidian engagements with music and one another during the mid-twentieth century. It will be published this summer (2026) with Ohio University Press's New African Histories series. She is currently working on two new projects: a book on anti-nuclear activism and African-Asian-Caribbean strategy and research on Ghanaian migrants and food entrepreneurs in central Massachusetts.
If you are in Cambridge/Boston, we encourage you to join us in the Seminar Room at the Harvard Center for African Studies. If you are joining us virtually, please register here on Zoom. Once you register, you will receive the Zoom Link in your email inbox.
For future workshops, please join our ASW mailing list. All speakers are listed below.