Simon Gikandi

Simon E. Gikandi (PhD Northwestern) is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his co-editorship (with Abiola Irele) of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He has also done important work on the modern African novel, and two distinguished African novelists: Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o.

Biography

Gikandi was born in Kenya and 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, Scotland, from where he graduated with a M.Litt. in English Studies. He has a Ph.D in English from Northwestern University.

Awards

Gikandi's 2011 study Slavery and the Culture of Taste has received various honors, including:

• Winner of the 14th Annual (2012) Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University
• Co-winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits Award, African Studies Association
• Co-Winner of the 2011 James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association
• One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012

Selected bibliography

• Reading the African Novel (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987).
• Reading Chinua Achebe (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991).
• Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
• Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
• Ngugi wa Thiongʹo (Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

External links

• Gikandi's Princeton homepage Accessed 20 Nov 2007.
• Book talk with Simon Gikandi, presented by the Institute of African Studies, Columbia University, January 31, 2012. YouTube.