Emmanuel Saboro is an Associate Professor at the Centre for African and International Studies at the University of Cape Coast where he served two terms as Director for the Centre. Currently, he serves as the Vice-Dean of the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He is a Trans-Disciplinary Scholar with research interests centered on the interface between African Literature, Cultural Memory, and Slavery Studies. A key feature of his scholarship is expanding the methodological tools available to uncover histories of regions and periods where written sources are either scarce or inaccessible. He applies historical, cultural, and literary methodologies to the study of Indigenous African cultures, collecting and interpreting oral traditions, songs, and oral histories related to slavery, its legacies, and afterlives through extensive ethnographic fieldwork. This complex data is complemented by literary analysis, contextual interpretation, and insights from Cultural Anthropology to construct rich narratives of the slave experience in West Africa and Ghana.
He is a recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies, African Humanities Post-doctoral fellowship. He has also held visiting fellowships at various Universities including the Summer International Advanced Research Institute (BIARI) at Brown University, Providence, USA, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Bonn Centre for Dependency Studies, University of Bonn, Germany, Visiting Scholar fellowship on the Speculative Play and Just Futurities Program, University of Indiana, Indianapolis, USA. His previous research partnerships include Authoring Slavery: Authorship and Agency in Narratives of Slavery in Ghana (with Danish partners, 2021–2024) and African Abolitionism: The Rise and Transformations of Anti-Slavery in Africa (AFRAB), in collaboration with University College London and institutions in Tanzania, Nigeria, and Cameroon (2021–2024). He currently serves on the International Advisory Board for PASSAGE (Partnership for Atlantic Slavery Scholarship, Archiving and Global Exchange), funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation. He is also a member of the International Ethics Advisory Board for the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council(AHRC)-funded project on Slavery and its Legacies: Collaboration, Memory, and Change. Saboro also serves as a Consultant for Study Abroad Programs in Ghana for foreign Students and Faculty who are seeking a nuanced understanding and knowledge of the history and Legacies of the Slave Trade and Reparative Justice in Africa more generally and in Ghana in particular.
He has attended and presented papers in International Conferences in the USA, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Germany, Cameroon, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania. He is the author of Wounds of Our Past: Remembering Captivity, Enslavement and Resistance in African Oral Narratives (Brill, 2022). The book examines memories of the slave era in Northern Ghana through song. The book contributes to scholarship on slavery-related lyrical traditions by analyzing songs among the Bulsa and Kasena ethnic groups as coded expressions of hope, resistance, and resilience. Having “no fixed meanings”, he describes them as both flexible and greatly useful for conveying a variety of meanings. His book chapters have appeared in edited collections published by Palgrave Macmillan Press, Markus Weiner Press in Princeton, and forthcoming in Cornell University Press and Brill. His Articles have appeared in The Nordic Journal of African Studies, Africology: Journal of Pan African Studies and Esclavages & post~esclavages, Slaveries & Post~Slaveries.
Currently Saboro is working on another book, tentatively titled Sites of Memory: The Lost and Hidden Stories that Sites and Spaces Tell about the Atlantic Slave Trade in Ghana. The book explores how cultural and historical sites in Ghana can be read not merely as physical remnants but as symbolic spaces imbued with metaphorical meaning. His main argument is that these sites "speak" and can be understood within the context of literary imagination and speculative history.
Saboro earned his Ph.D. at the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE), University of Hull, England and has been teaching at the University of Cape Coast since September 2010.
Research Supervision:
Saboro interested in supervising MA/Mphil and PhD research projects on the following themes:
African Slavery and Anti-Slavery Discourses
African Literature and Representations in Film
Cultural Memory and Collective Identity in Africa
African Oral Traditions
Ethnicity and Race-Making in Africa
Reparatory Justice on both Transatlantic and African Indigenous Slavery
