Guest Speaker
Professor F. Abiola IRELE

Professor Irele specializes in Black African and Caribbean literature in English and French, with strong interests in contemporary thought in francophone Africa, within the context of black intellectual history. In 2000, he was the recipient of a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a research project on “Southern African Praise Poetry.”

Professor Irele's publications include an annotated edition of Selected Poems of Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977), a collection of critical essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology ( 1981, reprinted 1990) an annotated edition of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1994; second edition 1999). A second collection of his essays entitled The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, was published in 2001 by Oxford University Press. He is co-editor, with Simon Gikandi, of the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature published in 2 volumes in 2004. He is a contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of World Literature , and general editor of the series “Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature.” From 1992 to 2003, he served as Editor of the journal Research in African Literatures . He is currently editing a collective volume on the African novel for Cambridge University Press. Adapted from the Department of Romance, Language and Literatures at Harvard University

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Conférencier Invité
Le Professeur F. Abiola IRELE