Professor Ato Quayson is Professor of English at Standford University. Prof. Quason is currently the Vice-President of the African Studies Association and will be president in November, 2019. He was elected recently elected as Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Prior to joining Stanford, he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University (2017-2019) and Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2017). He completed his BA at the University of Ghana with First Class Honours (English and Arabic) and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in Sept 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies. Prof Quayson has published widely on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory.

His publications include: Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997) Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000) (with David Theo Goldberg) Relocating Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minnesota University Press, 2003) Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (forthcoming Columbia University Press, 2007). Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Iteneraries of Transnationalism, co-winner of the Urban Association's 2015 Book Prize (non-North America) and one of The Gurdian's 10 Best Books on Cities in 2014. He also wrote the Introduction and Notes to the Penguin Classics edition of Nelson Mandela’s, No Easy Walk to Freedom (2002). Prof Quayson was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991-1994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. In 2004 he held a Fellowship at the Du Bois Institute for African-American Studies at Harvard University. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and has lectured widely in places such as Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Bergen, and on many campuses in the US, the UK, and in Europe more generally. Prof Quayson is the Chief Examiner in English for the International Baccalaureate and sits on the Commissioning Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom as well as on various other academic bodies and organisations. He was elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in December 2005. He is Senior Fellow of the International Institute for the Advanced Study of Cultures, Institutions and Economic Enterprise (IIAS).

Prof. Quayson's CV.