Junior Scholar's Excellence Award:
Dr. Nana Akua Amponsah
Dr. Nana Akua Amponsah has only just began her career as a scholar. However, she is already proving that her career will be a distinguished one. Both in her research and her teaching, Dr. Amponsah has continually strived for excellence and has already achieved great success.
Prior to beginning her higher education in the United States, Dr. Amponsah was already proving her capacity as an educator in the Ghana Education Service from 1995 until her move to the United States in 2003. She received her bachelor's degree in History, summa cum laude, from Oklahoma Panhandle State University in 2006, moving on to receive her Master's in History from Fort Hays State University in 2007, where she received the Best Master's Thesis Award.
Dr. Amponsah was awarded her PhD from the University of Texas in 2011. Her dissertation, Colonizing the Womb: Women, Midwifery, and the State in Colonial Ghana, deftly blended together three key themes in African historical studies: colonialism, health and medicine, and gender.
For this dissertation, Dr. Amponsah was awarded several prestigious fellowships, including The Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, Summer Research Grant; a History Department Graduate Fellowship; and the Patrice Lumumba Fellowship for Research in African History.
However, despite the high quality of her dissertation, Dr. Amponsah took only three and half years to complete her PhD, proving her drive and capacity to produce quality scholarship in a short period. During this time, she also managed to serve as a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Co-Coordinator of the well-organized and much complimented Women, Gender, and Sexuality conference.
Also prior to her PhD defense, Dr. Amponsah was invited to be a Visiting Professor at St. Andrew's Presbyterian College, during which time she taught the course "Africa and African Diaspora: History, Conception, and Culture.: Since last Fall, she has been serving as Assistant Professor of History, teaching African History and Global History, at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
Throughout her graduate career and extending into the beginnings of her professional career, Dr. Amponsah has shown a strong commitment to publishing. In addition to journal articles and several book reviews, she is also the co-author of the 2012 book Women's Roles in Sub-Saharan Africa (Women's Roles Through History), published by Greenwood Press, and she is the co-editor of the forthcoming book Women, Gender, and Sexualities in Africa..
A member of the National Women's Studies Association and the African Studies Association, Dr. Amponsah is also committed to professional service through her role as a reviewer for the digital journal The History Compass, and as the prior coordinator and volunteer for the Africa Conference series, as well as the coordinator of the African Feminist Series at the UT Warfield Center.
Currently in progress are a single authored manuscript derived from her doctoral research, entitled, Male Midwives in the Gold Coast: A Colonial Imposition?, as well as a contracted edited volume, Beyond the Boundaries. It is clear that Dr. Amponsah's career will result in many more such publications and a continued commitment to innovative research.
It is to her testament that the list of Dr. Amponsah's accomplishments is already so long, and we have the utmost confidence that it will continue to grow. Therefore, we are proud to give the Junior Scholar's Excellence Award to Dr. Nana Akua Amponsah.
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