CANCELED - Disputes with Vehemence: Historical Transition and Violent Disagreements in Tragedy from the Greeks to Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison

Ato Quayson

Chair, Department of English

Stanford University

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford in 2019, he taught for a decade at the University of Cambridge (where he got his PhD), for 12 years at the University of Toronto, and 2 years at NYU.

Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 8 edited collections, including the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2014). His most recent book is Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which was the recipient of the Warren-Brooks Best Book in Criticism Award for 2022. Forthcoming books include The City in World Literature, co-edited with Jini Kim Watson (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, co-edited with Ankhi Mukherjee (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is currently working on a collection of his own essays titled Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation, also with Cambridge University Press and scheduled for completion by the end of 2024. He is also co-authoring, with Grace Toleque, Accra Chic: The Locational History of Fashion in Accra (Intellect Press/Chicago University Press). The two of them are also working on a film documentary on Fashion Sustainability in Accra.

He is editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and Critic.Reading.Writing on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjoidh_R_bJCnXyKBkytP_g). He is also the host of Cambridge Contours: The Cambridge Literary Studies Hour, from Cambridge University Press (https://www.cambridge.org/core/browse-subjects/literature/contours-the-cambridge-literary-studies-hour).

Professor Quayson was President of the African Studies Association and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.