Stephan Miescher

I am a historian of nineteenth and twentieth-century West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. While my first book, Making Men in Ghana, explored the history of masculinities in Ghana by foregrounding the life histories of eight men, my new monograph, A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from Ghana, is a history of Ghana’s largest development project, the Akosombo Dam, completed in 1965. A Dam for Africa is accompanied by the documentary film Ghana’s Electric Dreams (dir. R. Lane Clark). I am currently embarking on a new book project about the ecologies and infrastructures of Ghana’s Volta Lake. In addition, I remain curious in and engaged with historical questions about gender, sexualities, development and technology, Africa’s environments, and the practice of oral history in Africa and beyond.