Another Nigerian has attained a new height in the American academic system with the announcement of Professor Cajetan Iheka as full Professor of English (Literary Studies) at Yale University, United States (U.S.) of America.
Professor Iheka’s research and teaching focus is on African and Caribbean literatures, ecocriticism, ecomedia and world literature.
According to his submission to the Yale Faculty, Iheka said: “I am the author or editor of four books. My first monograph, Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP 2018), reorients African literary criticism from its preoccupation with anthropocentric concerns to the imbrications of human and nonhuman beings in African imaginative writings. Naturalizing Africa won the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 African Literature Association First Book Prize.
“Most recently, I completed African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP 2021). Examining film, photography, and other visual arts, the monograph positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure in media studies and the environmental humanities. I am editor of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Options for Teaching volume, Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (MLA 2021), and co-editor of African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (Rochester UP 2018).
“With Stephanie Newell, I co-edited Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today (ALT 38, 2020). My articles have appeared in refereed venues such as Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Journal of Visual Culture, Environmental Ethics, Research in African Literatures, The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics, and The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities.
“My awards and fellowships include the Best Article Award of the African Literature Association, the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship, and the Andrew Mellon Research Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin. I serve as deputy editor of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.”
