About

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford University. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. His academic career includes positions at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature, as well as Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Prior to his current appointment at Stanford, he served as Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University and as Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto, where he was also appointed University Professor in 2016, the highest distinction the university can bestow. Professor Quayson has published extensively, including six monographs and eight edited volumes, focusing on postcolonial literature, African studies, diaspora, and transnationalism. His notable works include 'Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing,' 'Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?,' 'Calibrations: Reading for the Social,' 'Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation,' and 'Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism,' which was co-winner of the Urban History Association's 2015 Best Book Prize and named one of the 10 Best Books on Cities by The Guardian. His most recent book is 'Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature' (2021). He has also contributed to edited volumes and has works-in-progress related to urban studies and city literature. His research interests include African Languages, Literatures, and Cultures; Comparative Studies; Cultural History & Studies; Postcolonial Studies; Realism; and Theater. Professor Quayson has held fellowships at prestigious institutions such as Harvard's Du Bois Institute and the Australian National University, and he has lectured widely across multiple continents. He is the founding editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, has served as President of the African Studies Association, and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and the British Academy.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychoanalysis
• Epistemology
• Law
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• History
• Social psychology
• Anthropology
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Fukú Americanus and the Tragic Intertext: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

  The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry · 2026-04-13

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  On the Half-Life of Love instigates in the reader a Pierre Menard effect.One wishes it were possible to better his book by copying it out word-for-word and thus adding to its magnificent contribution to studies of Daz. 1 It is true that Jorge Luis Borges's character sought to do this with Cervantes' Don Quixote, implying that the generativity of the fictional world always legitimizes a form of (re)creation.But there is something special to be said for the careful and insightful work that Saldvar has done in his book to open even further avenues for thinking about Daz's work.For the meticulous process that he deploys to

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• The Neighborhood and the Sweatshop

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13 · 1 citations

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  This chapter will lay out a potted account of the literature of New York and its relationship to world literature braiding two main themes: first will be that of New York as a center of self-invention, a place that was primarily commercial at its inception but progressively expanded to embrace diverse forms of ethnic, cultural, sexual, and urban interactions. And second will be to focus on the significance of neighborhoods and sweatshops as the spatial vectors through which immigrants and diasporics gain a sense of New York. The bulk of the chapter and will be devoted to a close analysis of the chronotopes of the neighborhood and the sweatshop in Toni Morrison'sJazzand Melissa Rivero'sThe Affairs of the Falcónsrespectively as a means of grasping the relationship between localized foci of individual mobility, identity, and alienation in the literature of New York and the ways in which we might also discern these as key organizing principles of world literature.

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• Cambridge Companions To …

  2023-07-13

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• Select Bibliography

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

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• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02

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• Critical Approaches

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

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• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

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  The introductory chapter explores the way attention to cities and urban literatures expands the typical nodes of World Literary production. It does so, we argue, by activating not just a broader spatial imaginary or geographical reach for the field, but multiplies the historical and linguistic formations of potential literary world systems. The chapter offers three starting propositions about World Literature: that it seeks literary frameworks beyond the nation; it tends toward systematicity and totality; and it activates an interest in decolonizing literary systems. Given that urban centers are typically highly networked at regional, national and global scales, we then consider the way cities have typically functioned as cultural "switchboards" regarding the commingling of peoples, cultures, goods and ideas. Instead of offering a singular new theory of World Literature to supersede previous ones, our volume proffers accounts of world-connecting circuitry that depends upon the complex dialectics of urban materialities and worldly imaginations.

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• Spotlight Literary Cities

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

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• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-02 · 1 citations

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  Goodison's nuanced poem about the Hope Royal Botanical Gardens sheds light on the often-unbridgeable gap between the classroom and the world outside. The "post-colonial scholar" is often considered the killjoy whose knowledge of the history and aftermaths of colonialism subsumes the complex lived experiences of postcolonial societies. In this respect, she is not different than the critical race scholar, who in the United States is accused of a range of sins, including the distortion of American history, if they want to teach the roots of slavery. In his essay "Muse of History," Derek Walcott had cautioned against a petrifying of colonial history into myth, with its unchangeable binary of perpetrator and victim: "In the New World, servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters. Because this literature serves historic truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos" (What the Twilight Says 37).

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• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-13

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Frequent coauthors

• Tim Allen

  101 shared

• Fred Ahwireng‐Obeng

  101 shared

• Odile Goerg

  101 shared

• Peter Geschiere

  101 shared

• Richard Banégas

  101 shared

• Kelly Askew

  101 shared

• Filip De Boeck

  101 shared

• Jok Adam

  South African Institute of International Affairs

  101 shared

Awards & honors

• Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar (1991-1994)
• Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada
• Fellow of the British Academy
• Urban History Association's 2015 Best Book Prize (non-North…