Abamfo Ofori Atiemo

Abamfo Ofori Atiemo is a Senior Lecturer and former Head of the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Ghana, Legon. He obtained his PhD from the Free University of Amsterdam, after he had studied for a Master of Philosophy and a Bachelor of Arts degrees in the Study of Religions at the University of Ghana. He also holds other qualifications from the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague and the Trinity Theological Seminary at Legon in Ghana.

He has been a Senior Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advance Study in Shimla, India; a visiting lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana; and a visiting professor at the Faculty of Theology, University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has also been a Fellow of the Linnaeus-Palme Exchange Programme at the University of Gavle, Sweden.

He teaches Comparative/History of Religion and his current research interests include Religion and Human Rights; Hinduism in Ghana (with special interest in African Hindus); Evil and Popular Piety in Ghanaian Christianity and Islam.

Among his recent publications are:  Abamfo O. Atiemo, Ben-Willie Golo and Lawrence Boakye (eds.) Unpacking the Sense of the Sacred: A Reader in the Study of Religion (London: Ayebea Clarke, 2014) and Abamfo O. Atiemo, “Religion and custom are not the same: sacred traditional states and religious human rights in contemporary Ghana” in: Pieter Coertzen and Len Hansen, Law and Religion in Africa–The Quest for the Common Good in Pluralistic Societies (SUN Press, 2015).

As a visiting fellow of the ASC, he is working on the topic, ‘Myth and Nation Building: A religious History of Ghana’. He hopes to publish a journal article at the end of the fellowship.