LITERATURE AND ITS PUBLICS: PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
FRIDAY, 8 JANUARY, 10:15 A.M.–12:00 NOON, LONE STAR D, JW MARRIOTT
Ato Quayson is director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he has been since 2005. Quayson completed his BA at the University of Ghana and his PhD at the University of Cambridge; from there he went on to become a research fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford University, before returning to Cambridge from 1995 to 2005 to serve as a fellow of Pembroke College, director of the African Studies Centre, and reader in postcolonial and Commonwealth literature.
He has published widely in fields as varied as African literature and literary history, postcolonial studies, disability studies, diaspora and transnationalism, and urban studies. His books include the two-volume Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itinerary of Transnationalism. He is founding editor of the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.