Individual Listing

7709 HUMANITIES SOCSCI
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Kea, Ray A

Professor of History

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

History


Biography

Ray Kea was born and raised in Ohio. After teaching African history for eight years at The Johns Hopkins University, Kea held a joint appointment in African history at Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges. He arrived at UCR in the fall of 1991. Kea's research is focused on the history of West Africa and Ghana (i.e. the former Gold Coast and the kingdom of Asante) in the period between the fifteenth and nineteenth century. He has written on and is preparing articles on the relationship between the African diaspora in the Caribbean (especially the Danish Caribbean) and Europe. In addition, he is investigating the historical connection between the Western and Central Sudan of West Africa and the Mediterranean world between the twelfth/ thirteenth and sixteenth century.

Former Institution

Carlton & St. Olaf Colleges

Degrees

PhD African History 1974

University of London

MA African History 1967

University of Ghana

BA History 1957

Howard University

Awards

1995 UCLA-University of Ghana Exchange Program Visiting Professor
1994- Present Research Fellow, James S. Coleman African Studies Center
1985 Ford Foundation Fellowships, African History


Research Area

Fields of Interest: pre-colonial West African and Ghanaian economic, cultural, and social history.

Publications

He is author of Settlement, Trade and Polities in the Seventeenth Century
Gold Coast (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). He is currently working on a book which examines the social and cultural history of the eighteenth
and nineteenth century Gold Coast within the context of the Atlantic world.