Jinny Kathleen Prais

Jinny Prais is the Assistant Director to the Institute of African Studies at Columbia. She earned her doctorate in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. She has taught courses in African and world history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan, West Virginia University, and Columbia University. Her areas of teaching and research include citizenship and social movements; African cities and urban cultures; African diaspora and imperial networks; and colonial and gender identity formation in twentieth-century West Africa. 

Her publications include: “‘Casting the Badge of Inferiority Beneath Black Peoples’ Feet’: Archiving and Reading the African Past, Present and Future in World History” (with Mamadou Diouf), in Global Intellectual History, Andrew Sartori and Samuel Moyn, Eds. (Columbia University Press, 2013); "Representing an African City and Urban Elite: The Nightclubs, Dance Halls, and Red Light District of Interwar Accra," in The Arts of Citizenship in Africa Cities, Rosiland Fredericks and Mamadou Diouf, Eds. (Palgrave, Forthcoming). She is currently revising an article manuscript, "The Ambiguous Geography of Imperial Citizenship: Opportunities and Constraints of African Membership in the British Empire in the 1930s," and working on her book manuscript entitled Between Empire and the World: West Africans and the Politics of Race and Culture in Interwar London and Accra.

Education

• PhD in Women's Studies and History, University of Michigan