Lupenga Mphande is Associate Professor in the department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he teaches courses in language and society, literature, and the African diasporic studies.

Biography: Lupenga Mphande is Associate Professor in the department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he teaches courses in language and society, literature, and the African diaspora studies. As a creative writer, Mphande has publication four poetry collections: Crackle at Midnight (1998), and Thunderclaps (2021), Messages left behind (2011), Things circular (2015), and Crackle at Midnight (1998).

Language acts as a signifier of social distinction and group membership. Not only does language impacts our core traditions, values, and the way we interact with others in society, but also how language encodes culture and provides the means through which culture is shared and passed from one generation to the next. Thus, learning a language involves not only learning the alphabet, the meaning, the grammar rules, and the arrangement of words, but it also learning the behavior of the society and its cultural customs. Mphande’s research explores how the language that we speak influences our cultural identities and our social realities, and how language not only names objects, but also classifies individuals in a group and how it can be used by individuals and communities to express their unique identities, foster camaraderie, or subvert prevailing narratives. He also does research in the semantics of names and the natural environment. Mphande’s research also examines the imaginative expression capacity of the ideophone or words that evoke ideas in sound imitation to express an action, manner, or property. This class of morphology occurs only in a limited number of languages globally where it identifies some special morphological or lexical peculiarity, often associated with onomatopoeia. English, for example, does not have ideophones, although it has onomatopoeia.

As director of the African Languages Program, he has been responsible for designing the curriculum for the African languages, developing instructional materials, supervising the instructional, and the campus-wide training of foreign language instructors. To instill teamwork and best-practice foreign language instruction strategies and academic objectives. He also collaborated and liaised with other national institutions in setting standards for management and instruction for African foreign languages in the United States. As director of study abroad to broaden students’ opportunities to travel and see the world in a relative safe way, experience new colures while earning college credit, and form strong friendships that may last a lifetime. Studying abroad also improves teamwork, leadership, communication abilities, and a better understanding of their own personal and professional values.

Sample Publications:
Thunderclaps: New and Selected Poems, 2021. Cissus World Press, 141 pages.

"Mazisi Kunene and the New African Movement," in Futurism and the African Imagination: Literature and Other Arts, Routledge Publishing/Taylor & Francis, 2022: 103-121.

“Malawi Verse: Authenticity, African Literature, and Indigenous Aesthetic Forms,” Journal of Southern African Studies – Volume 46 Issue 2, 2020: 357-374. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057070.2020.1722547

“Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture,” in Selected Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African Languages and Linguistics in Broad Perspectives, John Mugane, John P. Hutchison, and Dee A. Worman Eds. Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project Publication 2006; 104-113.

“Ngugi and the world of Christianity: A Dialects,” in Journal of Asian and African Studies 39(5): 2004: 357-378.

Please see the attached pdf Curriculum Vitae (CV) below.