Prof. Akosua Keseboa Darkwah was born to Felicia and Kofi Darkwah while the latter was a Visiting Professor at Boston University on 10th February 1974.  A proud old girl of Wesley Girls’ High School (Class of 1990), she went on to study Psychology and Sociology at Vassar College in upstate New York and then did further studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Sociology finishing with her PhD in 2002.  Her PhD thesis was a study of the impact of structural adjustment policies on traders of global consumer goods at Makola market.   Since then, she has taught at the University of Ghana with a one year stint at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.  In 2025, she became the first female Full Professor in the Department of Sociology’s 75 year history.

She is widely recognised for her work on Ghanaian labour sociology having worked among others on markets, domestic workers, oil trainees, creatives and female parliamentarians as well as aspirants.  Her work has appeared in numerous high ranked publication outlets and she was adjudged the Best Researcher in the Social Sciences at the University of Ghana in 2022.  She has done various consultancy projects for international organisations such as the International Labour Organisation, the United Nations Children’s Education Fund and UN Women.  She devotes a lot of time to editorial work and has served as editor of Ghana Studies, Feminist Africa and the African Studies Review.  She is also Managing Editor of the Ghana Journal of Sociology and Anthropology.

Her administrative roles at the University of Ghana have included Head of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (2012-2016), Head of the Department of Sociology (2018-2021), Acting Dean of the School of Information and Communication Studies (2021-2022) and Dean of the School of Information and Communication Studies (2022-2025).  She also served as Acting Dean of the School of Graduate Studies from August to December 2025.