University of Cape Coast

Prof. Emmanuel  Saboro
Active

Prof. Emmanuel Saboro

Associate ProfessorSenior Memberesaboro@ucc.edu.gh

 Emmanuel Saboro is an Associate Professor and currently serving as Director of the Centre for African and International Studies, University of Cape Coast, Ghana . He obtained his doctoral degree at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation(WISE), University of Hull, England. He has received  a number of fellowships including that of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), African Humanities Program (F’17). He is an interdisciplinary scholar with research interests centred on the interface between African Literature, Cultural Memory and Slavery Studies.  Specifically, he has been interested in the impact of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa, late 19th and 20th Century Abolitionism and Anti-Slavery Discourses, 19th Century Internal Slave trafficking in Africa in general and Northern Ghana, in particular. Most recently, his research has focused on Memory, Trauma, Resistance and Identity Construction in Northern Ghana. An integral feature of his research has involved the expansion of the methodological tools scholars can use to uncover the histories of those time periods and areas of the world in which written sources are often scarce and inaccessible. Prof. Saboro has particularly been interested in applying historical, cultural and literary methodologies to the historical study of indigenous cultures in Africa. He has within the past 15 years through ethnographic fieldwork collected and interpreted oral traditions, songs and oral histories, on slavery, its legacies and afterlives across some Ghanaian communities. He has complemented this complex nuanced data with close literary reading techniques and contextual analyses, as well as insights from cultural anthropology to develop rich histories and narratives of the slave experience within the context of Ghana and West Africa.


He is the Author of Wounds of Our Past: Remembering , Captivity, Enslavement  and Resistance in African Oral Narratives. Brill: Leiden and Boston