Ato quayson biography of abraham

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Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, the book launches a thoroughly cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. A co-edited volume that brings together for the first time essays dealing with both diaspora and transnationalism, normally kept apart in the literature.

The first book to fully bring Euro-American writers alongside postcolonial ones for a discussion of the ubiquitous trope of disability, it is now an acknowledged classic in the fields of disability and postcolonial studies, and chapters from it have been anthologized in various collections.

  • Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing: Orality and History in Rev Samuel Johnson, Amos Tutuola, Wole Soyinka and Ben Okri.

    Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997. He further honed his skills, culminating in his Ph.D.

    Ato Quayson

    Education and career

    Born in Ghana, Quayson earned his BA at the University of Ghana and his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He has also been a visiting professor at Wellesley College, where he was named after Mary L.

    Cornille and in Turkey, Australia, and Israel.

    Professor Ato Quayson's distinguished career demonstrates his interes in education and his enormous influence on the fields of literature and the humanities.

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    The book has gone on to become a classic and is to be found in all African literature survey courses worldwide.
  • Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, ed.

    He holds the esteemed position of a professor of English.

    Quayson's academic journey began with an honors degree from the University of Ghana, a testament to his early intellectual prowess. His academic trajectory took him to Oxford University, where he served as a Junior Research Fellow, before returning to Cambridge to assume the positions of Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies and Fellow at Pembroke College.

    His versatility is evident in his role as a professor of African and Postcolonial literature at NYU and a professor of English at Toronto. His work, Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, was honored with the Urban History Association's 2015 Greatest Book Prize and featured in The Guardian's 2014 list of the greatest books on cities.

    Cambridge University Press published Quayson's most recent work, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature, which won the 2022 Warren-Brooks Prize for Literary Criticism.

    He has given numerous lectures in various parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. He was chair of the judges for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature.

    His book Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism was co-winner of the Urban History Association's top award in the international category for books published in 2013–14.


  • Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism, Duke University Press, 2014.

    Cambridge University Press, 2012. His current works include Exile and Diaspora in African Literature and Accra Chic: A Locational History of Fashion in Accra.

    Quayson's work has been supported by scholarships from Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and Australia's National University's Research Centre in the Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Royal Society of Canada.

    In addition to editing a number of books, Quayson has written essays for many publications, serving also on the editorial boards of journals including Research in African Literatures, African Diasporas, New Literary History, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Postcolonial Text.

    Seeking to trace Nigerian literary history from the perspective of a Yoruba matrix of cultural resources that informed the work of the writers in the title, the book fundamentally critiqued a by-then standard idea in the field that there was a natural relationship between orality and literacy in the work of African writers and rather argued that the presence of orality in African literature was due to the exercise of strategic aesthetic choices, some of which had nothing to do with orality but more to do with the pressures of identity-formation in the evolving nation-state that is Nigeria.

    ato quayson biography of abraham

    At Stanford University, he serves as the chair of the English Department and the newly formed Department of African and African American Studies. He held research fellowships at Wolfson College, Oxford (1994–95) and at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University (2004). From 1998 to 2005, he oversaw the Centre for African Studies at Cambridge, solidifying his reputation in the academic world.

    Quayson's academic journey has been marked by his contributions to various esteemed institutions.

    The first attempt at bringing together essays dealing with the literary history of postcolonial studies, with 42 contributors covering a wide range of topics, divided equally between geographical topics (Postcolonialism and Arab Literature; Postcolonial Literature in Latin America; Canadian Writing and Postcolonialism) and thematic ones (Indigenous Writing in Canada; Orality and the Genres of African Writing; Postcolonial Auto/Biography).

  • Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Columbia University Press, 2007.

    It clears the ground for seeing the two as mutually interrelated for our understanding of multi-ethnic liberal polities that have been shaped by the presence of diasporic communities.

  • The Cambridge Companion to the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
  • Oxford Street, Accra; Urban Evolution, Street Life and Itineraries of the Transnational (Duke University Press, 2014).
  • Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism Studies (with Girish Daswani; New York: Blackwell, 2013).
  • The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, 2 volumes (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  • Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations (with Antonela Arhin; New York: Routledge, 2012).
  • Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration (Oxford: Ayebia Publishers, 2008).
  • Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
  • African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism (with Tejumola Olaniyan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
  • Calibrations: Reading for the Social (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).
  • Relocating Postcolonialism (with David Theo Goldberg; Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).
  • Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
  • Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Oxford and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997).
    • Ato Quayson Wikipedia

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    Ato Quayson: A Biography of the Ghanaian English Professor at Stanford University

    From his birth on August 26, 1961, in Ghana, Ato Quayson has forged a remarkable career transcending borders and disciplines.

    Notable among these are Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process?, and Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing.