Ato Quayson

Ato Quayson (born 26 August 1961) is a Ghanaian literary critic and Professor of English at Stanford University where he acts as the current chair of the department.

He is also the chair of the newly established Department of African and African American Studies.

He was formerly a Professor of English at New York University (NYU), and before that was University Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto.

His writings on African literature, postcolonial studies, disability studies, urban studies and in literary theory have been widely published.

He was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991 to 1994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society and has held fellowships at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University (2004) and the Research Centre in the Humanities at the Australian National University (2015).

Born in Ghana, Quayson earned his BA (Hons, First Class) at the University of Ghana and his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995.

He went on to Oxford University as a Junior Research Fellow, before returning to Cambridge as a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English, where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

He also served on the board of the Noma Book Award (1997–2003), Africa's 100 Best Book Selection Panel (2001–2002), and several other literary juries and panels.

He was Chief Examiner in English of the International Baccalaureate (2005–07), and has been a member of the Diaspora and Migrations Project Committee of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the UK, and the European Research Council award grants panel on culture and cultural production (2011–2017).

He is a former President of the African Studies Association.

He is a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the Royal Society of Canada (2013), and in 2019 was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

In 2011–12 he was the Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at the Newhouse Centre at Wellesley College.

He has lectured widely in Singapore, Hong Kong, Turkey, Australia, Israel, and across Africa, Europe, and the United States.

In addition to editing a number of books, Quayson has written essays for many publications, serving also on the editorial boards of journals including Research in African Literatures, African Diasporas, New Literary History, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Postcolonial Text.

His book Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism was co-winner of the Urban History Association's top award in the international category for books published in 2013–14.

Quayson's most recent book is the 2021 publication, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature which, in its examination of tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present era, deploys postcolonial literature to explore the links between suffering and ethics.

He is founding editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and was chair of the judges for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature.