About

I teach and write about transatlantic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries. I am especially interested in how narratives from one transatlantic region—Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and/or the Americas—circulate and are consumed in other regions. For the past few years my main focus has been on African child soldier narratives, a transnational genre of novels and memoirs that achieved notable success in the United States and Europe, despite the relative indifference toward African writing in Western book markets. My research on this genre tends to revolve around predominant literary conventions, e.g. the ambivalent portrayal of humanitarian aid workers or how the texts make claims for the innocence of children who brutalize adults during wartime. I write about these and other features in Research in African Literatures, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Interventions, Genre, and English Studies. I am currently working on related projects/outputs in this area.