Africanist Press editor, Dr. Chernoh Alpha Bah has accepted a two-year appointment as Postdoctoral Research Associate with Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
The Watson Institute is an interdisciplinary research center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Its mission is to promote a just and peaceful world through research, teaching, and public engagement. The institute’s research focuses on development, security, and governance. Its faculty include anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, and other practitioners.
Dr. Bah is joining the Watson Institute from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he completed doctoral studies in history in the summer of 2023. Bah specializes in the medical, legal, and economic history of West Africa with complementary interests in Africanist anthropology. Under the auspices of the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, he is currently working for the online periodical, The Africanist Press, a media agency and investigative journalism project focusing on anti-corruption and development in Africa.
At Brown University, Bah will be attached to the Watson Institute’s Africa Initiative as its inaugural Postdoctoral Research Fellow. As part of the Watson Institute, the Africa Initiative helps to promote research, teaching, public engagement, and sustainable partnerships in and about Africa at Brown University. Under the auspices of the Africa Initiative, Bah will continue his research on West Africa’s illicit economic flows; a transnational project designed to document the sources of illicit financial flows in the Mano River corridor of West Africa and the outcomes of domestic financial neglect to the populations of Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. The project aims to build a database on transnational crime and corruption in West Africa from 1975 to present.
Bah has over two decades of experience working as a journalist, political activist, and writer in West Africa. He is author of The Ebola Outbreak in West Africa: Corporate Gangsters, Multinationals, and Rogue Politicians (2015), and Neocolonialism in West Africa: A Collection of Essays (2014). His current book project examines how prison labor was central to different kinds of medical and agricultural projects in Sierra Leone between the First and Second World Wars; and the ways medical researchers from Liverpool and colonial officials in Sierra Leone conceptualized and justified the use of convict labor.