Michel Doortmont

Michel Doortmont is a scholar of West African history and politics, with a focus on the Anglophone areas, and of Dutch-Ghanaian historical and cultural relations, African historiography, the Atlantic slave trade, and the Diaspora of the Black Atlantic. He is currently Reader in International Relations and African Studies at the University of Groningen, fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and member of the Regional Advisory Committee of SOAS GLOCAL, University of London. He is an Honorary Life Time Member of the African Studies Association (USA). He is co-editor of the book series African Sources for African History and Sources for African History, published by Brill. Formerly he held – inter alia – positions as member of the Policy Advisory Board of NWO-WOTRO, chair of the Nederlandse Vereniging voor Afrika Studies, chair of the NUFFIC Huygens PhD Scholarship Committee, member of the NWO Mosaic Scholarship Committee, and  co-editor of History in Africa: A Journal of Method, project director / academic coordinator of  the Erasmus Mundus Action 2 programme EU-SATURN, promoting and facilitating mobility of students and scholars from South Africa to the European Union, and member of the NWO Rubicon Scholarships selection committee.

His publications, as (co-) author and/or editor, include 'The pen-pictures of modern Africans and African celebrities by Charles Francis Hutchison. A collective biography of elite society in the Gold Coast Colony' (Brill, 2004); 'The castles of Ghana: Axim, Butre, Anomabu. Historical and architectural research on three Ghana forts' (Ricerca e Cooperazione etc., 2006), with Benedetta Savoldi; 'Sources for the mutual history of Ghana and the Netherlands. An annotated guide to the Dutch archives relating to Ghana and West Africa in the Nationaal Archief, 1593-1960s' (Brill, 2007), with Jinna Smit; 'Trans-Atlantic slave trade: Landmarks, legacies, expectations' (Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007), with J.R. Anquandah and N.J. Opoku-Agyemang; 'The Ankobra Gold Route Project: Studies in the Historical Relationship between Western Ghana and the Dutch' (Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2013).