COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES PROGRAM


Evan Maina Mwangi teaches 20th Century Anglophone African Literature. He studied at the University of Nairobi, from where where he graduated with a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in literature. He has taught courses in World Literature, Literary Theory, Postcolonial Discourse, Writing and Composition, Journalism and Mass Communication, and African Studies. He researches the intersection of nationalism, gender, and sexuality in canonical and popular artistic expressions, relating local texts to global theories.

Mwangi has published on Nazizi Hirji, Chinua Achebe, K. Sello Duiker, Amandina Lihamba, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, David Maillu, Henry ole Kulet, Margaret Ogola, and Francis Imbuga, among other postcolonial artists and intellectuals. His articles and poems have appeared in Mwangaza, TDR: The Drama Review, Research in African Literatures, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, English Studies in Africa, The Nairobi Journal of Literature, PMLA, and Africa Today.

The co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2007), Mwangi's other works include Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (State University of New York Press, 2009), which studies the way African writers use experimental forms to express submerged identities. He has finished work on a manuscript on the gender and translation in African literature. It considers translations of texts between African languages. Using and critiquing theories of translation proposed by Lawrence Venuti, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Domenico Jervolino, and Gayatri Spivak, the manuscript analyzes works by such writers as Amandina Lihamba, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gakaara wa Wanjau, and Julius Nyerere in terms of the way they localize foreign texts. He is currently at work on two new book projects: one on the global re-writings of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the other on the dialogue between animal studies and postcolonial texts.