Nana Osei Quarshie is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and in the Program in the History of Science and Medicine, with secondary appointments in the Section of the History of Medicine in the Yale School of Medicine, and in the Department of Anthropology. Quarshie holds a BA in African Studies, History, and Political Science from the University of Toronto (2011). He read for the MSc in Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies at the London School of Economics (2012) and for the MA in History and Literature at Columbia Global Centers | Paris (2013), where he was also Pensionnaire Étranger at the Ecole Normale Supérieur - Ulm (2012-2013). Quarshie received his doctorate from the Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History at the University of Michigan (2020). His first book project, An African Pharmakon, examines the place of psychiatric care in processes of social stratification and in the production of national, regional, and ethnic diversity in West Africa. This research has been supported by the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Race, Law, and History Fellowship at the Michigan Law School, and the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF), among others. At Yale, Quarshie teaches courses on the global history of psychiatry and confinement, African systems of thought, and on historical methods beyond the archive.
Publications
- (Under Review) “The Archive of False Prophets: Delusional Worldmaking in a West African Psychiatric Hospital.” Solicited at Africa for the themed issue on “New Global Histories of Psychiatry and Madness.” Guest edited by Nancy R. Hunt and Hubertus Büschel.
- (Forthcoming) “Mass Expulsion as Internal Exclusion: Police Raids and the Imprisonment of West African Immigrants in Ghana, 1969 – 1974.” in Prisons in Africa. London, UK and New York, NY: Routledge Press. Edited by Frederic le Marcis and Marie Morelle.
- French Translation : « L’expulsion en masse comme outil d’exclusion intérieure : raids de police et emprisonnement des migrants d’Afrique occidentale au Ghana, 1969–1974 » in L’Afrique en Prison. Lyon, France: ENS Editions. Edited by Frederic le Marcis and Marie Morelle.
- 2020: “Contracted Intimacies: Psychiatric Nursing Conspiracies in the Gold Coast.” in Politique Africaine themed issue on “l’ordinaire de la folie/The Ordinary of Madness,” n° 157: 91 – 110. https://doi.org/10.3917/polaf.157.0091
- 2020: “Katie Kilroy-Marac’s An Impossible Inheritance: Postcolonial Psychiatry and the Work of Memory in a West African Clinic” (Review) in Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology. http://somatosphere.net/2020/kilroy-marac-impossible-inheritance.html/
- 2015: “Confinement in the Lunatic Asylums of the Gold Coast from 1887-1906,” Psychopathologie africaine (36) 2: 191 – 226.