Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson (born 26 August 1961) is a Ghanaian academic and literary critic, who is Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto. His writings on African literature, postcolonial studies and in literary theory have been widely published.

Education and career

Born in Ghana, Quayson earned his BA at the University of Ghana and his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He went on to Oxford University as a Research Fellow, before in September 1995 returning to Cambridge as a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English, where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

He was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991 to 1994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. He held research fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford (1994–95) and at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University (2004). In 2011–12 he was the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the Newhouse Centre at Wellesley College. He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Society of Canada.

In addition to editing a number of books, Quayson has written essays for many publications, serving also on the editorial boards of journals including Research in African Literatures, African Diasporas, New Literary History, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Postcolonial Text. He was chair of the judges for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature.

Selected publications

Edited

• Oxford Street, Accra; Urban Evolution, Street Life and Itineraries of the Transnational (Duke University Press, 2014).
• Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies (with Girish Daswani; New York: Blackwell, 2013).
• The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, 2 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations (with Antonela Arhin; New York: Routledge, 2012).
• Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration (Oxford: Ayebia Publishers, 2008).
• Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
• African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (with Tejumola Olaniyan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
• Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).
• Relocating Postcolonialism (with David Theo Goldberg; Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
• Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
• Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997).