Nana Osei Quarshie, assistant professor of history at Yale University, has won the 2026 Cheiron Book Prize for his new book African Pharmakon: The Asylum as Shrine From Slavery to the Return (University of Chicago Press, 2025). The prize is presented annually by Cheiron: The International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Dr. Quarshie’s award-winning publication examines “how the history of psychiatry in Ghana was never just about medicine; it was about migration, exile, and the politics of who gets to stay and who must be cast out.” The monograph is Dr. Quarshie’s debut book.
At Yale, Dr. Quarshie teaches in the program in the history of science and medicine and holds affiliations with the department of anthropology and the Yale School of Medicine. His scholarship centers on the relationship between mental healing, political expulsions, immigration, and urban belonging in West Africa since the seventeenth century.
Dr. Quarshie is a graduate of the University of Toronto, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in African studies, history, and political science. He holds a master’s degree in race, ethnicity, and postcolonial studies from the London School of Economics; a master’s degree in history and literature from a joint program at Columbia University in New York City and the Ecole normale supérieur and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in France; and a Ph.D. in anthropology and history from the University of Michigan.
