I research, write about, and teach global Anglophone literature of the 20th-21st centuries—especially African literature, postcolonial poetry, and modernism. I am Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University and Research Fellow in English at Stellenbosch University. Before joining the faculty at WOU, I obtained my PhD in English at University of Leeds.
My research spans postcolonial studies, trauma and memory studies, posthumanism, the environmental humanities, poetry and poetics, psychoanalysis, and religion and the postsecular. I am especially interested in theorizing how Indigenous modes of thought reframe the practice of literary and cultural criticism.
My first book, Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature (SUNY Press, 2025) argues that African literature conceptualizes trauma and regeneration as a more-than-human process. From an animist viewpoint, the self is not an individual but rather a regenerative process linking the living, the dead, and their ecosystems. Looking at poetry, fiction, drama, and visual art—including archival manuscripts by Wole Soyinka and Yvonne Vera—this book considers how African literature reinvents these Indigenous ecologies in uniquely modern ways.
My articles and book chapters appear in English Language Notes, Research in African Literatures, Interventions, Mo