Ben Halm, an award-winning playwright and English professor at Fairfield University, has died after a lengthy illness. He was 49.

Halm, an expert on African Literature and Culture, taught literature, drama and writing at Fairfield since 1993. He was the author of the 1995 book Theatre and Ideology, and he received numerous awards and grants, including a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship from the U.S. government.

He enjoyed success in the theatre world as a playwright, director and actor.

Halm was born in Accra, Ghana, in 1957. He received a bachelor’s degree, majoring in Drama with English, from the University of Ghana in 1980. He was awarded a Master of Fine Arts degree in Acting from York University, in Toronto, Canada, in 1984, and a Master of Arts degree in Theatre from Cornell University in 1988. He received his Ph.D. in Theatre from Cornell in 1991.

After teaching for two years at Webster University in Saint Louis, Mo., he joined the Fairfield faculty as an associate professor in 1993.

Several of the plays Halm wrote were produced on stages in Toronto and St. Louis, Mo; his “Ota Bernga, Elegy for the Elephant” was produced at Fairfield University in 1997,. He worked as a director of such plays as “Waiting For Godot” at the PepsiCo Studio Theatre at Fairfield and “Largo Desolato” at the Wein Experimental Theatre at Fairfield. He acted in productions staged in St. Louis, Ithaca, NY, and Toronto. He was playwright-in-residence at the Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, Canada.

Halm was a panelist at dozens of academic conferences. He was a member of the African Literature Association and the Modern Language Association. At the time of his death, he had been working on a number of scholarly projects, on theatre and on African literature and culture in a time of globalization. He also was writing a trilogy of plays, “War Fairs.”

He enjoyed Ghanaian music (drums, percussion, guitar) and West African dance forms. He was fluent in Ga, Adangbe, Twi, and Ewe (indigenous Ghanaian languages) as well as English, with proficiency in French and Spanish.

Halm died July 24. He is survived by his wife, Christina Maku Halm, and his daughter, Willow Kai Halm.

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