Ato Quayson (Prof.)

Professor Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Stanford University. He did his BA (First Class Honors, English and Arabic) at the University of Ghana, then went to the University of Cambridge to take his PhD after which he proceeded to the University of Oxford for a JRF (post-doc) then back to Cambridge as Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of English and Fellow of Pembroke College in 1995. He got tenure 3 years later (the first Black person to achieve this in the history of Cambridge) then rose to become Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature. He was also the Director of the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge, a post he held from 1997-2005.

In 2005, Professor Quayson was recruited to the University of Toronto to be the founding Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies and Professor of English. In 2016 he was appointed University Professor at the University of Toronto, a distinction that is reserved for not more than 2% of the Professoriate. He moved to the Department of English at New York University in 2017 and then to Stanford University in 2019.

Professor Quayson has written 6 single-authored monographs and edited 8 essay collections. His monographs include Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (Indiana University Press, 1997; from his PhD dissertation), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007), and Oxford Street, Accra (Duke University Press, 2014; co-winner of the Best Book Prize of the Urban History Association (non-North America) and also named by The Guardian newspaper as one of the best 10 books on cities in 2014). His most recent monograph is Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Professor Quayson is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.