About

Before joining University of Ghana, I spent over eighteen years working across the fields of language, persuasion and narrative in the corporate world. My career in integrated marketing communications spanned roles as a certified, multi-award-winning Advertising Copywriter, Brand Strategist, Creative Director and Marketing Communications professional. These functions eventually led to positions in the C-suite as Chief Executive Officer of several prestigious organisations in corporate Ghana, including Origin8 Saatchi & Saatchi (the former Saatchi & Saatchi affiliate) and AdSpace DDB Ghana (the former Doyle Dane Bernbach affiliate), and as Managing Creative Director at Fourth Protocol Advertising. I have also held leadership positions at GeniSys Solutions, Imprint Ghana and Platform Ghana. Additionally, I served as a communications strategy and creative consultant for Primus Advertising Ghana, Active Media, Accra International School of Advertising and Design and many others. 

My communications experience provided a huge incentive for my work as a literary scholar. I came to realise that whether in a 30-second television commercial or a 300-page novel, language is technology and story product of that technology. I became increasingly aware that language and story, together, represented powerful tools for shaping minds, worldviews, identities and aspirations. This realisation ultimately drew me back to the university, this time as a scholar. I teach courses in African oral narrative traditions, Ghanaian literature, early English literature, the English novel and literary stylistics.

My teaching and research are, therefore, deeply informed by the practical question: how do narratives, whether oral epic, Akan drum language, Ananse folktale, African myth, newspaper ad, social media copy, or the English novel, construct and challenge power, identity and representation?

I am hugely thrilled to bring this hybrid perspective to the classroom, inviting my students to read literary texts not as artifacts sealed in the past, but as living, strategic acts of communication and representation.

Education

• PhD in English Literature, University of Ghana, Legon, 2017
• MPhil in English, University of Ghana, Legon, 2008
• Qualifying Certificate in Company Directorship, Graduate School of Governance and Leadership (now Accra Business School), 2012
• Professional Diploma in Advertising Copywriting, Institute of Copywriting (now Blackford Centre for Copywriting, South Africa), 2009

• BA in English, University of Cape Coast, 1999

   

Postdoctoral Fellowship

• African Humanities Program (American Council of Learned Societies/Makerere University, Uganda), 2018

Research Interest

My research sits at the crossroads of cultural poetics and literature, colonial discourse and postcolonial narrative theory, and literary stylistics and the discourse of persuasion. Specific interests include:

Ananse-ism: Exploring the social, psychological, linguistic and philosophical roles Kweku Ananse, the archetypal Akan trickster, plays in simultaneously formulating and subverting Akan values, mores and ethics. Much of my intellectual energy has been expended in studying this complex character and what he means for society.  

Akan Folklore and Its Poetics: Examining the Akan oral folktale tradition, mythology, drum language, ritual arts, visual arts, and verbal arts as representations of Akan‑African epistemological and ontological consciousness. How these forms encode distinct ways of knowing and being in the world, and how they challenge Western assumptions about “literature.”

The English Novel & Empire: Investigating how the 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century English fiction encodes, and occasionally subverts, colonial ideologies. Specifically, I examine how the colonialist fiction of writers such as Aphra Behn, Henry Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary, Graham Greene, Nicholas Monsarrat and others articulate discourses of conquest, racial superiority and African disempowerment in the context of European colonialism and Empire.  

Memory and Monuments as Mnemonics of Enslavement: Interrogating how museums, monuments and public spaces in the ex-colonial capitals of Ghana and areas around them, especially in Cape Coast and Elmina, become inflected as strained and hoarse nonhuman voices articulating the contact, contract and contest that developed between the Akan-African and the European at the Atlantic seaboard of Ghana during the great age of Empire.   

Literary Stylistics & Professional Writing: Applying the tools of linguistic analysis such as foregrounding, transitivity and metaphor to improve clarity and impact in corporate, strategic and public communication.

Publications

Amissah-Arthur, J.B. “Myth, Migrancy and the Metropole: Akan-African Folktales as a Mythocolonial Syntax of Survival.” Kente: Cape Coast Journal of Literature and the Arts 1.2 (2026), pp. 1-20, https://doi.org/10.47963/jla.v1i2.1993 

Amissah-Arthur, J.B. “i-Ananse, Digital Ritual and the Theory of Antistructure: Negotiating Tempo-spatial Liminality in Computer-Remediated Ananse Films.” In Ignatius Chukwumah (Ed.) Teaching Anglophone African Film, MLA (forthcoming, 2026).

Amissah-Arthur, J.B. and Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang, “From Oral to Digital and Back: Adinkra Symbols and Kweku Ananse on YouTube.” In Torsa Ghosal (Ed.) Global Perspectives on Digital Literature, Routledge, 2023, pp. 181-95. https://www.routledge.com/Global-Perspectives-on-Digital-Literature-A-Critical-Introduction-for-the-Twenty-First-Century/Ghosal/p/book/9781032103495

Amissah-Arthur, J.B. “Pudendic Cult and Public Discourse: Pornogrammar as a Rhetorical Strategy in Ghana's Public Spaces.” In Ignatius Chukwumah (Ed.) Sexual Humour in Africa: Gender, Jokes and Social Change, Routledge, London: 2022. pp. 65-87. https://www.routledge.com/Sexual-Humour-in-Africa-Gender-Jokes-and-Societal-Change/Chukwumah/p/book/9780367776251

Amissah-Arthur, J.B. “Akan Theory of Mind: Trickster and the Divine Middle Ground in the Akan Folktale Tradition.” In Dominica Dipio (Ed.) Moving Back into the Future: Critical Recovering of Africa’s Cultural Heritage, Makerere University Press, Kampala: 2021. pp. 33-50. 

https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/3936653

Amissah-Arthur, J.B. “Theorising Pornogrammar in the Akan Folktale Tradition: The Trickster’s Rhetorical Indirection and Sexual Indiscretion,” Legon Journal of the Humanities, 30.1 (2019): Special Issue; pp. 54-81. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ljh/article/view/191100