Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and Chair of the Department of English at Stanford University. He will be the inaugural chair of the new Department of African and African American Studies at Stanford from January 2024. Prior to joining Stanford in 2019, he taught for a decade at the University of Cambridge (where he got his PhD), for 12 years at the University of Toronto, where he was founding director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and 2 years at NYU. 

Professor Quayson has published 6 monographs and 8 edited collections, including the award-winning Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (Duke University Press, 2014). His most recent book is Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which received the Warren-Brooks Best Book in Criticism Award for 2022. Forthcoming books include The City in World Literature, co-edited with Jini Kim Watson (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and Decolonizing the English Literary Curriculum, co-edited with Ankhi Mukherjee (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is currently working on a collection of his own essays titled Interdisciplinarity and Interpretation, also with Cambridge University Press and scheduled for completion by the end of 2024.

Professor Quayson was President of the African Studies Association and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy. He was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023.