Jennifer Hart

Jennifer Hart is Professor and Department Chair in History. A historian of mobility, technology, infrastructure, and urban space in Ghana, West Africa, Hart is the author of Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation (Indiana University Press, 2016) and Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra (Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2024).

Her work is found in numerous edited collections and journals, including Technology and Culture, International Review of Social History, International Journal of African Historical Studies, African Economic History, Urban Forum, Africa Today, and History in Africa. She is a recipient of the Boahen-Wilks Prize from the Ghana Studies Association and was a 2016 Finalist for the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association.

A committed public and digital scholar, she is the director of Accra Wala, a spatially-embedded, community-generated archive of urban life in Accra, Ghana, and a long-time collaborator on the Instagram-embedded project @thistrotrolife. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Africa is a Country, Inside Higher Ed, History@Work, The Metropole, Clio and the Contemporary, Nursing Clio, The Conversation, TAP Narratives, and The Detroit News. She also writes on her own blog, www.ghanaonthego.com. 

She currently serves as a senior scholar working on general education in the Office of Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and University. She is the North American President for the International Society for the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning in History, a member of the Executive Council for the African Studies Association, and a member of the Africa Initiative Steering Committee for the Society for the History of Technology.