Carina Ray

Carina Ray is a scholar of race and sexuality; comparative colonialisms and nationalisms; migration and maritime history; print cultures; bodily aesthetics, and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and political power, Ray’s research is primarily focused on Ghana and its diasporas. She is the author of Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana, winner of the American Historical Association's 2016 Wesley-Logan Book Prize and the African Studies Association's 2017 Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize. Her articles have appeared in Gender and History, PMLA, The Journal of West African History, and The American Historical Review, among others. She is series co-editor of New African Histories (Ohio University Press) with Jacob Dlamini and Derek Peterson;  African Identities: Past and Present (Cambridge University Press) with Toyin Falola; and Ohio Short Histories of Africa (Ohio University Press) with Dan Magaziner, Michelle Moyd, and Moses Ochunu. Ray previously served as editor of Ghana Studies and as a member of the Board of Editors for The American Historical Review.

Ray's current book project, (Im)Pressing Blackness: Race in Print Across Ghana’s Long Twentieth Century, draws on Ghana’s dynamic print culture to explore how Ghanaians turned the press into a generative site for constructing, claiming, and contesting blackness as a political and embodied identity during a protracted period of great political, economic, social, and cultural upheaval. She is also working on a long-term oral history project that explores the sprawling Cuban presence in Cold War-era Africa through the voices of the Cuban women and men who served there. 

Selected Publications:

Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politcs of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio, 2015)

Editor (with Jeremy Rich), Navigating African Maritime History (Liverpool, 2009)

Editor (with Salah Hassan), Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader (Cornell/Prince Claus Fund, 2009)

"Interracial Intimacies and the Gendered Optics of African Nationalism in the Colonial Metropole," (Journal of West African History, 2019)

"Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Colonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast" (AHR, 2014)

Fields of Study:

• Africa; West Africa; Ghana
• African Diaspora
• Race 
• Gender and Sexuality
• Print Culture