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, 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. My research tends to ask how postcolonial aesthetic forms reframe the philosophical assumptions undergirding literary studies at large. In this regard, I have examined how African literature revises scholarly understandings of trauma and memory studies, postcolonial theory and poetics, global modernism, Indigenous knowledge systems, posthumanism, the environmental humanities, and religion and the postsecular.

My first book, Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature, is forthcoming with SUNY Press.

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