Evan Mwangi
Assistant Professor in English
University Hall 326
Telephone: 847-491-3529
Fax: 847-467-1545
E-mail: evan-mwangi@northwestern.edu
Evan Maina Mwangi teaches 20th Century Anglophone African Literature. He studied at the University of Nairobi where he graduated with a First Class Honours degree and a PhD in literature. He has taught courses in World Literature, Literary Theory, Postcolonial Discourse, Writing and Composition, Journalism and Mass Communication, and African Studies. He researches the intersection of nationalism, gender, and sexuality in canonical and popular artistic expressions, relating local texts to global theories.
Mwangi has published on Nazizi Hirji, Chinua Achebe, K. Sello Duiker, Amandina Lihamba, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, David Maillu, Henry ole Kulet, Margaret Ogola, and Francis Imbuga, among other postcolonial artists and intellectuals. His articles and poems have appeared in Mwangaza, TDR: The Drama Review, Research in African Literatures, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, English Studies in Africa, The Nairobi Journal of Literature, PMLA, and Africa Today.
The co-author of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (Columbia University Press, 2007), Mwangi's latest book is Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality (State University of New York Press, 2009). Among other projects on African sports, murals, film, Sherlock Holmes, and hip hop, he is finishing work on a monograph investigating the place of gender and sexuality in the politics of language and translation in Africa. His next book project is tentatively titled Blacks of the Ear: Celebrity Culture, Sound, and African Literature. It concerns the relationship between popular culture and literary taste in Africa.
