Nana Osei Quarshie

Nana Osei Quarshie's picture
Assistant Professor
On Leave: 
Academic Year 23-24
Office: 
HQ 251
Fields of interest: 

West Africa; Medicine; Migration and Political Expulsions; Urbanization

Bio: 
Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, where he is also affiliated with the Department of Anthropology and the Yale School of Medicine. An anthropologist and historian by training, Quarshie examines the relationship among mental healing, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century. His research has been funded by the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the University of Michigan, and Yale University. Among other venues, Quarshie’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Bulletin of the History of MedicinePolitique AfricainePsychopathologie Africaine and Somatosphere. He is currently revising his first monograph, An African Pharmakon: Psychiatry and the Mind Politic of Modern Ghana.
 
Education
Ph.D., Anthropology & History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2020
M.A., History & Literature, Columbia University/ENS – Ulm/EHESS, 2013
M.Sc., Race, Ethnicity, & Postcolonial Studies, London School of Economics, 2012
H.B.A., African Studies, History, & Political Science, University of Toronto, St. George, 2011
 
Publications
 
Journal Articles
2024, “Cocoa and Compliance: How Exemptions Made Mass Expulsion in Ghana,” History and Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2275788
 
2023, “Spiritual Pawning: “Mad Slaves” and Mental Healing in Atlantic-era West Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 65: 3, 475 – 499. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417523000051
 
2022, “Psychiatry on a Shoestring: West Africa and the Global Movements of Deinstitutionalization,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 96, no. 2: 237 – 265. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2022.0023
*2023 Walter D. Love Prize in British History from the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS)
*2023 Forum for History of Human Science (FHHS) Article Prize
 
2020, “Contracted Intimacies: Psychiatric Nursing Conspiracies in the Gold Coast,” Politique Africaine n° 157: 91 – 110. https://doi.org/10.3917/polaf.157.0091
 
2015, “Confinement in the Lunatic Asylums of the Gold Coast from 1887-1906,” Psychopathologie Africaine (36) 2: 191 – 226.
 
Book Chapters
Forthcoming: “Archives of False Prophets: Inventing the Future in a West African Psychiatric Hospital” in Psychiatric Contours and New African Histories of Madness. Eds. Hubertus Büschel and Nancy Rose Hunt. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/psychiatric-contours
 
2021: “Mass Expulsion as Internal Exclusion: Police Raids and the Imprisonment of West African Immigrants in Ghana, 1969 – 1974” in Confinement, Punishment, and Prisons in Africa. Eds. Julia Hornberger, Frederic le Marcis and Marie Morelle. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge Press, p. 40 – 54. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003009627-5
  • Translated and Republished as « L’expulsion en masse comme outil d’exclusion intérieure: raids de police et emprisonnement des migrants d’Afrique occidentale au Ghana, 1969–1974 » dans L’Afrique en Prisons. Édité par Frederic le Marcis et Marie Morelle. Lyon, France: ENS Editions, 2022, p. 259 – 275. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.enseditions.40895
 
Book Reviews
2020 “Katie Kilroy-Marac’s An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic” (Review) in Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropologyhttp://somatosphere.net/2020/kilroy-marac-impossible-inheritance.html/
 
Interviews
2021: “From Unconventional Archives to Troves of Hauntings” with Sarah Pickman, for The Order of Multitudes, Sawyer Seminar. https://web.archive.org/web/20221202120440/https://orderofm.com/conversation/from-unconventional-archives-to-troves-of-hauntings/
 
Period: 
Modern
Recent
Geography: 
Africa
Thematic: 
Empires & Colonialism
Legal
Race & Ethnicity
Science, Technology, Medicine