Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson is Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University. He will be the inaugural chair of the new Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford in 2024. He has published widely on African literature, literary theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. His works include Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, winner of the Urban History Association's 2015 Best Book Prize; Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, which received the Warren-Brooks Best Book in Criticism Award for 2022; and the co-edited The City in World Literature.

Quayson has served as President of the African Studies Association and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.  Prior to joining Stanford in 2019, he taught at University of Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. He also taught at University of Toronto, where he was founding director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies.