Profile

Jinny Prais

• Postdoctoral Research Scholar
  Committee on Global Thought
  Columbia University

Jinny Prais earned her Ph.D. in History and Women's Studies from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation examined the anti-colonial nationalist projects of elite university-educated, cosmopolitan, and colonized Anglophone West Africans who traveled for higher education between London and Accra during the years between the two World Wars. She explores how their movement within and between these different worlds enabled them to share, borrow, and combine a wide range of concepts critical to their nation building gender roles and relationships, sexuality, marriage, and family structure. Through the process of negotiating these concepts, this elite group creatively appropriated colonial, international and imperial resources to found an Anglophone West African public sphere of clubs and newspapers, and a modern African citizen to inhabit that sphere. This sphere had connections with colonial and imperial structures, but was its own entity, and its citizens were poised to lobby for self-government. Prais is currently preparing her dissertation as a book manuscript, further investigating the influence of black internationalism, and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 on their history.