. .

AAAS Home • Graduate Program • Undergraduate Program • Courses • Languages • People.

Dr. F. Abiola Irele, Project Principal Investigator

Professor Irele read English at University College Ibadan, graduating in 1960 with an honours degree of the University of London, and went on to obtain in 1966 a doctorate degree of the University of Paris (Sorbonne), obtained with a dissertation on the work of the Martinican poet, Aimé Césaire. He has taught at the University of Lagos and the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). in Nigeria, and also at the University of Ghana. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Dakar, Senegal, during the 1979-1980 academic year, Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, England, and Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at Tulane University, New Orleans in 2001.

Professor Irele is the author of numerous articles on African literature in English and French. His publications include an edition of selected poems by the Senegalese poet and statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a collection of critical essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, and an edition of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. A collection of his essays entitled The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, was published in the summer of 2001 by Oxford University Press.

Professor Irele has also written extensively on francophone African philosophy, on which he has contributed an entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He delivered the McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard University in April 2001, under the title Black Utopia; the lectures are soon to be published by Oxford University Press. He is a contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and is currently working on a study of Léopold Sédar Senghor for the series "Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature," of which he is general editor. Since 1992, he has been editor of the journal Research in African Literatures. Professor Irele was President of the African Literature Association in 1992-93, and has served on various committees of the Modern Language Association (MLA); he was the Chair of the Francophone Studies Committee of the association, and has recently been elected to the nominating committee of the MLA.

---

---