About Dr. Benjamin Talton
Benjamin Talton is the Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. He is an historian who researches and writes about culture and politics in Africa and the African diaspora. He earned his BA in history at Howard University and his doctorate, also in history, at the University of Chicago.
Prior to joining Howard, Dr. Talton was Professor of History at Temple University. He has also taught African History at Hofstra University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana.
A highly respected author, Dr. Talton has published three books: The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave 2010); Black Subjects in Africa and its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (Palgrave 2011), which he co-edited with Dr. Quincy Mills of the University of Maryland; and, most recently, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Penn Press 2019), which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association. Among his current projects is co-editing Volume III of the Cambridge History of the African Diaspora, with Monique Bedasse and Nemata Blyden, and, chief-editor of all three of the series’ volumes, Michael Gomez.
Dr. Talton’s work has also appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals and popular media outlets, including The Washington Post, Jacobin, Current History, the Journal of Asian and African Studies, The African Studies Review, The Conversation, Ghana Studies, and Africa Is A Country.
Dr. Talton is an editor of African Studies Review, the leading North American peer-reviewed African Studies journal, and serves on the advisory board for New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD). Dr. Talton is a past president of the Ghana Studies Association and a former member of the executive board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).