Professor
Simon E. Gikandi
Princeton University
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
Literature and Language Studies
Elected
2018
Literary historian and postcolonial theorist. Editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean Since 1950 (2016) and co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004). Leading scholar of the novel with extensive global and historical scope. First book breaks ground for the modern African novel. Writing in Limbo (1992) probes Caribbean modernism's debt to Europe. Maps of Englishness (1997) surveys colonialism's effect on identity and novelistic form. Slavery and the Culture of Taste (J. R. Lowell Prize, 2011, the MLA's most prestigious book prize) aligns Enlightenment philosophies of taste with the Atlantic slave trade.
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