Dr. Cajetan Iheka

Biography

Cajetan Iheka specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, postcolonial studies, and world literatures. He serves as the director of the Whitney Humanities Center and is the chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale University. His notable works include 'Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature' (Cambridge 2018), which won the 2019 Ecocritical Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the 2020 African Literature Association Book Prize. His monograph 'African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics' (Duke 2021) positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure. This work has also received multiple accolades, including the 2022 African Studies Association Book Prize. He has edited and co-edited significant volumes including 'Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media' (2022) and 'African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, Space' (2018). Additionally, he has articles forthcoming in distinguished journals such as PMLA and New Literary History. Iheka is currently the editor-in-chief of the African Studies Review, a multidisciplinary journal from the African Studies Association.

Research Interests