Akosua Adomako Ampofo is a Professor of African and Gender Studies, and Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Legon. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University, and holds an MSc in Development Planning from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, a Post-graduate Diploma in Spatial Planning from the University of Dortmund, and a BSc in Architectural Design, also from KNUST.

An activist-scholar, her work addresses issues of African Knowledge Systems, Higher Education, Reproductive Health, Identity Politics, Gender-based Violence, Women’s Work, Masculinities, and Popular Culture (music and religion). Her recent publications include:

  • Men of God and Gendered Knowledge” (with Michael PK Okyerefo, 2014) recently launched at UCT in Brenda Cooper and Robert Morrell (Eds.) Africa- Centred Knowledges: Crossing Fields and Worlds. Oxford: James Currey;
  • Changing Representations of Women in Ghanaian Popular music: Marrying research and advocacy” Current Sociology (60): 258-279 (with Awo Asiedu, 2012);
  • Phallic Competence: Fatherhood and the Making of Men in Ghana” (2009, with Michael P.K. Okyerefo and Michael Perverah in Culture, Societies and Masculinities);
  • With Signe Arnfred she co-edited the 2009 collection, African Feminist Research and Activism - Tensions, Challenges and Possibilities. Uppsala: Nordic Africa.
  • She is co-editor of Ghana Studies (University of Wisconsin Press) with Stephan Miescher (UC Santa Barbara).

Adomako Ampofo is a member of diverse professional and civil society organisations including the African Studies Association, the Ghana Studies Association and the International Sociological Association (of which she is co-president of the Research Committee on Women and Society with Josephine Beoku-Betts, Florida Atlantic University). She is an Advisory/Steering Committee Board Member of the African Humanities Fellowship Program, the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Fellowship Program, the Centre for African Studies at the University of the Free State, South Africa, the African Heritage Initiative at the University of Michigan, the Transatlantic Roundtable on Religion and Race. Adomako Ampofo has been a Board Member of the Ghana AIDS Commission, Co-convenor of the Women’s Caucus of the ASA and has done work with organizations such as the Ministry of Health (Ghana), the Association of African Universities, CODESRIA, the National Research Foundation (South Africa, with Carnegie Corporation), and a variety of UN agencies. She has received awards from the Rockefeller foundation, the Population Council, the Spencer Foundation, UNFPA, WHO, and has been a Rockefeller Bellagio Centre Resident, a Fulbright Junior scholar as well as a Fulbright New Century Scholar. In 2010 she was awarded the Sociologists for Women in Society Feminist Activism award. Adomako Ampofo is the 2014 AW Mellon Research Fellow at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town.

Event type: Seminar
Date of event: Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Venue: Centre for African Studies Gallery, Upper Campus, UCT