Nana Osei-Opare

Nana Osei-Opare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Center for African and African American Studies at Rice University. He specializes in African, international, and Cold War histories, with a focus on Ghana’s political and decolonization projects during the Kwame Nkrumah era, as well as Soviet entanglements and Black Marxist thought.

Education: Ph.D. from UCLA (2019), M.A. and A.B. from Stanford University (2011).

Research interests include African History, International History, historical methodology, and Africa-Soviet relations. His first book, Socialist De-Colony: Black and Soviet Entanglements in Ghana’s Cold War, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. He co-edited Socialism, Internationalism, and Development in the Third World (Bloomsbury, 2024) and has published in journals like Comparative Studies in Society and History and Journal of African History.

Awards include the National Endowment for the Humanities and Ford Foundation Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, and multiple teaching awards at UCLA and Fordham University. He is co-editing the Cambridge History of African Political Thought and a Slavic Review special issue on Blackness in Slavic societies.

Osei-Opare mentors students in African, international, and Cold War history and leads the Global & International History Seminar Series at Rice. His current projects include a study of Ghana’s socialist movement in the fourth republic and a history of the Convention People’s Party.