Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English and inaugural chair of the Department of African and African American Studies

He studied for his undergraduate degree at the University of Ghana and took his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford before returning to Cambridge to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature in the Faculty of English from 1995-2005. He was also Director of the Centre for African Studies and a Fellow of Pembroke College while at Cambridge. Prior to Stanford he was Professor of African and Postcolonial Literature at New York University (2017-2019) and Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto (2005-2017).

Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 10 edited volumes.  His books include the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, (Duke University Press, 2014; co-winner of the Urban History Association Prize non-North American division), and Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021; winner of the Warren-Brooks Award for Literary Criticism).

Professor Quayson is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.  He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.