John H. Hanson

John H. Hanson is professor in the Department of History and the African Studies Program at Indiana University at Bloomington. His scholarship concerns the religious imagination and social initiatives of West African Muslims. His most recent book, The Ahmadiyya in the Gold Coast: Muslim Cosmopolitans in the British Empire (2017), explores the African contributions to the arrival and expansion of a South Asian Muslim reform movement in colonial Ghana. His most recent English translation of West African Arabic texts appear in the Africa Online Digital Library (active since 2016). Hanson served for years as an editor of two journals, Africa Today and History in Africa, as well as the director of the African Studies Program. He currently is interim chair in the Department of History. He received the John W. Ryan award for distinguished contributions to International Studies at Indiana University in 2011.