Prof. De-Valera N Y M Botchway is Professor at the Department of History and Diplomacy at University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He focuses on the Social and Cultural History of African and Diasporic African peoples. He was Associate Professor of History from 2015 to February 2020. He has a PhD and an MPhil in History. They were obtained in 2011 and 2004 respectively. He is also an adjunct lecturer and supervisor of theses of African Studies in the Centre for African and International Studies in the same university. He is also the patron and coordinator of African Students and Empowerment Group, a society of young scholars at the University of Cape Coast that is committed to the quest of an African Renaissance and the protection of tangible and intangible cultural heritages in Africa.
Prof. De-Valera Botchway has comparative and interdisciplinary research interests as well as multidisciplinary teaching expertise in several fields of African and African Diaspora history and studies. These include the history of West Africa, Regionalism and Integration in Africa, Black Religious and Cultural Nationalism(s), World Civilisations, Sports (Boxing) in Ghana, Africans in Dispersion, Children and Popular Culture, and African Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Pan Africanism and the quest for Sustainable Development in Africa. Fundamentally, his researches form a convergence within the social and cultural history of Africa and the African and global historic and cultural exchanges and experiences.
Prof. De-Valera Botchway has had scholarship and research enterprises in some international universities. He was in the University of Cambridge, England, as a Fellow of the Centre of African Studies in 2006 to 2007. He became a Visiting Scholar and Global Academic Partner in the University of South Florida in 2010, and an Exchange Faculty in the Grand Valley State University, Michigan in 2012. He was given the African Humanities Program Fellowship award of 2013/2014 by the American Council of Learned Society and had a postdoctoral experience at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. He is part of the editorial panel of two journals – Drumspeak and Asemka in the Faculty of Arts, University of Cape Coast, Ghana, and on the editorial board of Abibisem, a journal of African Culture and Civilisation, based in the Department of History, University of Cape Coast. He is a member of the Historical Society of Ghana. He has published several academic articles and books.
He is the author of Boxing is no Cakewalk! Azumah “Ring Professor” Nelson in the Social History of Ghanaian Boxing (2019), which is part of the African Humanities Series, under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Carnegie Corporation, New York. He also co-edited New Perspectives of African Childhood: Constructions, Histories and Understandings (2019) and Africa and the First World War: Remembrance, Memories and Representations after 100 Years (2018).
