Emmanuel Kwao Mensah graduated in 2023 as a valedictorian from the University of Ghana with a double honours in Classical History & Civilisation and Information Studies. Until recently, he was a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana, Legon.
As one of the beneficiaries of the Classics Beyond Borders project— a collaborative initiative between the Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana and the faculty of Classics at Cambridge University that seeks to deprovincialize the discipline of Classics and to extend its tentacles beyond the West, Emmanuel continues to receive free advanced language training in Ancient Greek and Latin from Professor Rosanna Omitowoju and Daisy Belfield Santos. As part of the efforts of globalizing the discipline of Classics, Emmanuel is currently translating Caesar Augustus' Res Gestae from Latin to Ga—an indigenous African language spoken in most parts of Accra, Ghana.
Emmanuel specializes primarily in feminist and womanist readings in Ancient Greek tragedies. Engaged with both the conception of Gender and sexuality in the Ancient Greek patriarchal societies and their attendant attributions of 'roles' to particularly women in Ancient Greek plays, Emmanuel's research focuses on 'the psychology of incapacitation' in most female roles in Ancient Greek Tragedies where this incapacitation translates as the lack of 'agential capacity' in furthering a supposed cause of action.
Currently, Emmanuel is also concerned with the globalization of Greco-Roman Classics as an academic discipline. While this work is both a focus of research study as well as a project he is passionate about, Emmanuel has been added to the list of collaborators by Professor Luke Roman on the Project Classics And/In Africa — a project whose focus has been to redirect the exclusive focus on ancient Greek and Roman Classics to the study of the broader ancient Mediterranean as a space of diversity and connectivity and to trace the transmission of classical antiquity in cultures and regions beyond the West. He therefore presented a paper at a conference at UCL in London on the topic "Global Classics Project: Roadmap to an Inclusive Classics in Sub-Saharan Africa?" This project seeks to bring diverse cultures into global conversation with Classics as the sole unifier.
Following from this, Emmanuel is now working on a project: Black Classicism and the Narrative of Epistemic Seclusion — a paper he will also present at the 1st international Graduate Conference in Ghana.
While aiming to build a career in academia, Emmanuel thinks that the discipline of Classics, even though was used as a tool for colonial oppression in Ghana, can also be used to correct the mistakes of the past by diversifying its approaches to include African reception and adaptation of the discipline.
