MSU’s Department of History graduate student Emmanuel Ankomahene has received two competitive awards that will support his research on labor, mobility, identity, and railway development in Ghana.
A doctoral candidate in African History, Ankomahene’s research focuses on African labor, transportation and urban histories, and the African diaspora. His dissertation project investigates how Ghana’s colonial and post-colonial railway construction and development shaped African wage-labor migration, settlements, the construction of race and gender, and the formation of industrial and ethnic identities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This year, he was selected to receive funding through the Dean's Institutional Access Small Grant Program and an Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) Research Grant, which will help expand and share his research with scholarly audiences.
“Receiving such generous financial support from the Dean’s Institutional Access Small Grant Program and the ASMEA Research Grant Program offers an excellent opportunity for me to employ in-depth archival materials and ethnographic methods for my project, advancing access scholarship on railway transport and labor histories in Ghana, while contributing to broader conversations about mobility, infrastructure, and socio-cultural values in Africa,” said Ankomahene.
“By investigating Ghana’s railway development and labor relations, this funding would allow me to offer fresh perspectives on how railway transport infrastructure shaped corporate, gender, and ethnic identities in colonial and post-colonial Ghana. More significantly, these awards will further enable me to reframe Ghana’s railway system not merely as a transport infrastructure but also as a significant historical and cultural heritage site that merits national recognition and urgent preservation.”
The Dean's Institutional Access Small Grant Program, administered through the College of Social Science's Office of Institutional Access, supports graduate student research that advances understanding of barriers to access and opportunity within higher education and society. The award will help fund dissertation research for his project, Living on the Iron Horse: Railway Infrastructure, Labor Mobility, Industrial, Gender and Ethnic Identities in Ghana, 1898-1980, including research activities in Ghana and the United Kingdom.
In addition, Ankomahene received an ASMEA Research Grant to support a related project, "Reconstructing Railway Heritage: Archiving and Digitizing the History and Memory of Ghana's Trains and Tracks, 1898-1966." The grant program funds original research on topics relevant to Africa and the Middle East.
As part of this award, he will present his research at the 19th Annual ASMEA Conference, scheduled for Nov. 7-9, 2026, in Washington, D.C.