Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University with affiliations in the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in African Studies, and the Center for African American Studies. He graduated with a B.A [First Class Honors] in Literature from the University of Nairobi. He was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland from which he graduated with a M.Litt. in English Studies. He has a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University. His major Fields of Research and Teaching are the Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Postcolonial Britain, the “Black” Atlantic and the African Diaspora. He is also interested in the encounter between European and African languages in the modern period, literature and human rights, and writing and cultural politics.

He is the author of many books and articles including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which was a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004, and co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature and the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature. His latest book, The Aura of Blackness: Slavery and the Culture of Taste is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. He is currently working on This Thing Called English: The Colonized and their Books and Modernism and Early Postcolonial Style and editing vol 11 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Novel in Africa and the Atlantic World.