Research Interests

Carina Ray works on Modern African History and is particularly interested in the racial and sexual politics of colonial rule; the comparative histories of race mixture in Africa and the African Diaspora; the African Diaspora and reverse migration; and the relationship between race, ethnicity, and political power in post-independence Africa.

Currently she is working on her book manuscript, Policing Sexual Boundaries: The Politics of Race in Colonial Ghana, which focuses on the creation and contestation of sexual boundaries between Africans and Europeans in the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana). Therein, she argues that the domain of colonial interracial sexual relations in the Gold Coast became a space in which various hierarchies (racial, administrative, gendered, indigenous) were created, contested and reordered by a broad range of social actors, both African and European.

Ray's next project explores the historical evolution of popular ideas about the relationship between race, citizenship, and political power in Ghana by using, as a point of entry, the case of the country's former head of state, J.J. Rawlings (1981-2000), who is of Ghanaian (Ewe) and Scottish parentage. By situating Rawlings in the much longer history of the often fluid, but at times contested integration of people of mixed African and European background into both indigenous and colonial political structures, she intends to trace how the relationship between race and the right to hold political power has been popularly conceived and practiced at different historical moments over the course of the colonial and post-independence periods, and how these ideas have intersected with the question of ethnicity and reshaped notions of citizenship in Ghana.

In addition to teaching modern African history courses, Ray teaches courses that explore African history in the context of the wider Black Atlantic world, as well as urban history in Africa. Future course offerings will likely include a seminar on comparative colonialisms and nationalisms in Africa, as well as a seminar on comparative histories of race mixture in Africa, the African Diaspora, and beyond. She is also a columnist for New African magazine, the oldest Pan-African monthly magazine in print. As part of her efforts to make African History accessible to the broadest audience possible, each month her column, "Lest We Forget," takes a set of archival documents and tells the story that emerges from them.