Francis Abiola Irele

Address:
Harvard University
Department of African and African American Studies
Barker Center
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Phone: 617.495.3799
Email: irele@fas.

Courses   |   Biography  |   Recent Publications |   Curriculum Vitae

Courses

African and African American Studies 185. Perspectives in the African Novel (Fall 2007)

Biography

Francis Abiola Irele is from Nigeria, where he was Professor of French at the University of Ibadan, and served from 1977 to 1980, and from 1983 to 1987, as Head of the Department of Modern Languages. He has held positions at the University of Lagos, the University of Ghana, Legon, and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University ), Nigeria . From 1987 to 2003, he was Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at Ohio State University, and Editor of Research in African Literatures (1992 to 2003). He was Visiting Professor at the University of Dakar during the 1979-1980 academic year, and in 1999, he held an appointment as Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. Professor Irele also spent the Fall semester of the year 2001 as Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans. Professor Irele delivered the McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard University in April 2001, which were entitled "Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal."

Professor Irele pursued a degree in English at University College Ibadan, graduating in 1960 with honors from the University of London, and, in 1966, went on to obtain a doctorate degree from the University of Paris (Sorbonne) with a dissertation on the poetry of Aimé Césaire.

Professor Irele's most recent work is The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004), a collective volume co-edited with Simon Gikandi and published in two volumes. His other publications include: an edition of selected poems by the Senegalese poet and statesman Léopold Sédar Senghor (1977), a collection of critical essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology ( 1981, reprinted 1990) an annotated edition of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1994; second edition 1999). A second collection of his essays entitled The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora, was published in 2001 by Oxford University Press. Professor Irele has also written extensively on francophone African philosophy, on which he contributed an entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A new collection of essays, Négritude et Condition Africaine is forthcoming from Karthala, Paris.

A contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of World Literature, Professor Irele is currently collaborating with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in the preparation of an Anthology of African Literature. He is General Editor of the series Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature.

Professor Irele was President of the African Literature Association in 1992-1993, and has served on various committees of the Modern Language Association (MLA); he was Chair of the Francophone Studies Committee from 1999 to 2000, member of the Nominating Committee from 2001 to 2003 and has recently been elected to a three year-term as member of the Executive Committee of the Association.

Recent Publications

The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, Two volumes, co-edited with Simon Gikandi (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

The African Imagination: Literature in Africa & the Black Diaspora, (Oxford University Press, 2001)

“`What is Africa to Me?': Africa in the Black Diaspora Imagination.” Souls, Special Number, Critical Perspectives on W.E.B. Du Bois.Volume 7, Numbers 3-4, Summer/Fall, 2005. pp. 26-46.

“In Search of Camara Laye.” Textual Ownership in Francophone Africa. Special Number, Research in African Literatures. Ed. by Alec Hargreaves. Vol 37, No 1. Spring, 2006. 110-127.

“Ezeulu as World Historical Figure.” In Isidore Diala, Ed., The ResponsibleCritic. Trenton , NJ : Africa World Press, 2006. 97-111.

Curriculum Vitae

Francis Abiola Irele