Second annual F. T. Prince Memorial Lecture with Professor Simon Gikandi: Arrow of God: The Novel and the Problem of Modernity Event
For more information regarding this event, please email Tracy Storey at tps@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
We are pleased to announce that Professor Simon Gikandi, the Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, will be visiting the University of Southampton for the second annual F. T. Prince Memorial Lecture.
About the lecture
This is the second F.T. Prince Memorial Lecture. These lectures will be given annually in honour of the poet and scholar F.T. Prince, who was one of Southampton's first English professors. Invited speakers will explore new directions in literary studies, drawing on the English department's wide range of intellectual interests. This year's lecture has been organised in collaboration with an inter-university conference celebrating Chinua Achebe's achievement and Arrow of God at 50.
About the speaker
Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University and editor of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Languages Association (MLA). His major fields of research and teaching are the Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean and postcolonial Britain, the black Atlantic and the African diaspora.
He is also interested in the encounter between European and African languages in the modern period, literature and human rights, and writing and cultural politics. He is the author of many books and articles including Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. He is also the co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945, the co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature and the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature.
His book Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton University Press, 2011) has won many major awards, including the Melbern Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University, the Melville Herskovits Award for the most important scholarly work in African studies and the James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding scholarly work by a member of the Modern Languages Association.