Faculty Director
Simon Gikandi, the Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton 
University, specializes in Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; of the “Black” Atlantic; and of the African diaspora. He studied at the University of Nairobi, was a British Council Scholar at the University of Edinburgh, and received a Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University. 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. He is the general editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature and a coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature. He is currently completing a book on the relation between slavery and the culture of taste.
