Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, specializes in Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; the “Black” Atlantic; and the African diaspora. He studied at the University of Nairobi and was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburg. His many books include Reading the African Novel; Reading Chinua Achebe; Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. His most recent book, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, was published in 2011. Gikandi is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature and coeditor, with Abiola Irele, of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. His current book project is “Translating English.” Ph.D. Northwestern University