Carina E Ray

Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, and Harry Coplan Chair of Social Sciences

Departments/Programs

African and African American Studies
History
Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Degrees

Cornell University, Ph.D.
Cornell University, M.A.
University of California, Santa Cruz, B.A.

Expertise

African and Black Atlantic history; West Africa; Ghana; race, gender, and sexuality; comparative colonialisms and nationalisms; migration and maritime histories; print cultures; bodily aesthetics; and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and political power

Profile

Carina Ray is an associate professor of African and African-American Studies and Director of Faculty Mentoring. 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_ (Ohio University Press, 2015). Her articles have appeared in Gender and History, PMLA, The Journal of West African History, and The American Historical Review, among others. Her current book projects form a trilogy that engages questions of blackness, the body, race, identity formation and transformation, and ideas about human difference in Ghana and its West African environs. _Somatic Blackness: A Longue Durée History of the Body in West Africa_ traces the development of indigenous ideas about blackness, the body, and human difference within local, regional, transregional, and global networks of exchange and knowledge production. _Black on White: Writing Race in the Gold Coast Press (1857-1957)_ and _Becoming Black Stars: Race and State Politics in Ghana_ track the transformations that occurred across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Ghanaians constructed, claimed, and contested blackness as a political identity in opposition to (white) British colonial rule and in conversation with African nationalism and global Pan-Africanism. She is also working on a longterm oral history project documenting the experiences of Cubans who served in Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. She is editor, with Jean Allman, Derek Peterson, and Allen Isaacman, of Ohio University Press's New African Histories book series; editor, with Toyin Falola, of the Cambridge University Press book series, African Identities; former editor of _Ghana Studies_ (2017-2020); member of the Board of Editors of _The American Historical Review_ and _History in Africa_; and advisory board member of the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series.

Courses Taught

AAAS	5a	Introduction to African and African American Studies
AAAS	115a	Introduction to African History
AAAS	120a	African History in Real Time
AAAS	135a	Race, Sex, and Colonialism
AAAS	146b	African Icons
AAAS	151b	Africa: A Reggae Anthology
AAAS	162a	Assassination: A History of 20th Century Africa

Awards and Honors

Mandel Faculty Grant in the Humanities (2018)

Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, African Studies Association, Women's Caucus (2017)

Finalist, Fage and Oliver Book Prize, United Kingdom African Studies Association (2016)

Wesley-Logan Book Prize for African Diaspora History, American Historical Association (2016)

Berkshire Conference of Women Historian's 2014 Article Prize (2015)

Society for the Humanities Fellowship, Cornell University (2015)

OpEd Project Public Voices Fellowship (2011 - 2012)

Center for African American Studies Fellowship, Princeton University (2009 - 2010)

Choice 2009-2010 Significant Press Title for Undergraduates (2009)

Scholarship

Ray, Carina E. "Interracial Intimacies and the Gendered Optics of African Nationalism in the Colonial Metropole." Journal of West African History 5. 2 (2020): 57-84.

Ray, Carina. "Oxford Street, Accra: Rethinking the Roots of Cosmopolitanism from an Africanist Historian's Perspective." PMLA 131. 2 (2016): 505-514.

Ray, Carina. "When Sex Threatened the State." Rev. of When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958, by Saheed Aderinto. Journal of the History of Sexuality vol. 25 of 3 September 2016: 508-510.

Ray, Carina. "World War Two and the Sex Trade in British West Africa." Africa and World War II. Ed. Judith Byfield, et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015

Ray, Carina. Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana. 1st ed. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015.

Ray, Carina. "Decrying White Peril: Interracial Sex and the Rise of Anticolonial Nationalism in the Gold Coast." The American Historical Review 119. 1 (2014): 78-110.

Ray, Carina. "Interracial Sex and the Making of Empire." A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism. Ed. Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani. Wiley Blackwell, 2013

Ray, Carina. "Sex Trafficking, Prostitution, and the Law in Colonial British West Africa, 1911-1943." Trafficking in Slavery's Wake: Law and the Experience of Women and Children in Africa. Ed. Benjamin Lawrance and Richard Roberts. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012

Ray, Carina. "Tales from the New African Archive." Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 38. 2 (2012): 13-24.

Ray, Carina (with Jeremy Rich), ed. Navigating African Maritime History. Liverpool: International Maritime Economic History Association/University of Liverpool Press, 2009.

Ray, Carina (with Jeremy Rich). "Charted Routes and New Directions in the Study of Africa's Maritime History." Navigating African Maritime History. Ed. Ray, Carina (with Jeremy Rich). International Maritime Economic Association/University of Liverpool Press, 2009

Ray, Carina (with Salah Hassan), ed. Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader. 1st ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press and The Prince Claus Fund Library, 2009.

Ray, Carina (with Salah Hassan). "Critically Reading Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan." Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader. Ed. Carina Ray (with Salah Hassan). Ithaca: Cornell University Press/Prince Claus Fund Library, 2009

Ray, Carina. "'The White Wife Problem': Sex, Race, and the Contested Politics of Repatriation to Interwar British West Africa." Gender and History 21. 3 (2009): 628-646.

Ray, Carina. "Darfur in the African Press." Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader. Ed. Carina Ray (with Salah Hassan). Cornell University Press/Prince Claus Fund Library, 2009

Ray, Carina. "Social History and the Engendering of African History." Power and Nationalism in Modern Africa: Essays in Honor of Don Ohadike. Ed. Toyin Falola and Salah Hassan. Carolina Academic Press, 2008