Faculty/Staff Information

Ph.D., University of Leeds

I regularly teach on postcolonial literature, African literature, British literature, modernism, cultural trauma and memory studies, literary criticism and theory, poetry and poetics, science fiction, as well as topical courses such as "The Human & the Nonhuman" and "Everything is Spiritual."

I specialize in Anglophone literature of the 20th-21st centuries, with an emphasis on African literature, postcolonial poetry, and modernism. My research spans postcolonial studies, trauma and memory studies, posthumanism, the environmental humanities, poetry and poetics, psychoanalysis, and religion and the postsecular. I am especially interested in theorizing how Indigenous modes of thought reframe the practice of literary and cultural criticism.

My book, Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature, is available through SUNY Press. The paperback will be out in February of 2026. https://sunypress.edu/Books/A/Animist-Poetics

My articles appear in English Language Notes, Research in African Liteartures, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, the Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, and elsewhere.

For more information, visit my website: www.ryantopper.com