Scholars@Duke

• Background
• 

  Education, Training, & Certifications

  • Ph.D., Harvard University 2020
• Recognition
• 

  In the News

  • OCT 29, 2022

    Department of History

    Historian and Fiction Writer Sarah Balakrishnan Is Complicating Our Narratives of Africa
• Research
• 

  Fellowships, Supported Research, & Other Grants

  • Interdisciplinary Project Grant awarded by Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory 2022
  • Sawyer Seminar Grant awarded by Mellon Foundation 2022 - 2025
  • International Dissertation Research Fellowship awarded by Social Science Research Council 2017 - 2018
  • Dissertation Fellowship awarded by Social Science & Humanities Research Council 2016 - 2019
• Publications & Artistic Works
• 

  Selected Publications

  • Academic Articles

    • Balakrishnan, S. “The jailhouse divergence: Why debtors’ prisons disappeared in 19th century Europe and flourished in West Africa.” Punishment and Society 24, no. 5 (December 1, 2022): 807–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221081961.
       Full Text  Open Access Copy
    • Balakrishnan, Sarah. “Paul Glen Grant. Healing and Power in Ghana: Early Indigenous Expressions of Christianity. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2020. 327 pp. $57.99. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-1481312677.” African Studies Review 65, no. 3 (September 2022): E51–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2022.44.
       Full Text
    • Balakrishnan, Sarah. “Building the Ancestral Public: Cemeteries and the Necropolitics of Property in Colonial Ghana.” Journal of Social History 56, no. 1 (September 1, 2022): 89–113. https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shac010.
       Full Text  Open Access Copy
    • Balakrishnan, S. “Of debt and bondage: From slavery to prisons in the Gold Coast, c. 1807-1957.” Journal of African History 61, no. 1 (March 1, 2020): 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021853720000018.
       Full Text  Open Access Copy
    • Balakrishnan, S. “Afrocentrism Revisited: Africa in the Philosophy of Black Nationalism.” Souls 22, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 71–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2019.1711566.
       Full Text  Open Access Copy
    • Balakrishnan, S. “Imperial policing and the antinomies of power in early colonial Ghana.” International Journal of African Historical Studies 53, no. 2 (January 1, 2020): 173–93.
    • Balakrishnan, Sarah. “The Afropolitan Idea: New Perspectives on Cosmopolitanism in African Studies.” History Compass 15, no. 2 (February 2017): e12362–e12362. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12362.
       Full Text  Open Access Copy
    • Mbembe, Sarah, and Sarah Balakrishnan. “Pan-African Legacies, Afropolitan Futures.” Transition, no. 120 (2016): 28–28. https://doi.org/10.2979/transition.120.1.04.
       Full Text  Open Access Copy
• Teaching & Mentoring
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  Recent Courses

  • HISTORY 102: Introduction to Modern African History 2022

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