Born in Ghana, Quayson earned his BA 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 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 and the Research Centre in the Humanities at the Australian National University. 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. 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.. He also served on the board of the Noma Book Award, Africa's 100 Best Book Selection Panel, and several other literary juries and panels. 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.
Selected publications
Books
and thematic ones.
Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Columbia University Press, 2007. Focusing primarily on the work of Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, and J. M. Coetzee, the book launches a thoroughly cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of the representation of physical disability. The first book to fully bring Euro-American writers alongside postcolonial ones for a discussion of the ubiquitous trope of disability, it is now an acknowledged classic in the fields of disability and postcolonial studies, and chapters from it have been anthologised in various collections.
Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism, ed. with Girish Daswani, New York: Blackwell, 2013. A co-edited volume that brings together for the first time essays dealing with both diaspora and transnationalism, normally kept apart in the literature. It clears the ground for seeing the two as mutually interrelated for our understanding of multi-ethnic liberal polities that have been shaped by the presence of diasporic communities.
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, 2 volumes.
Labour Migration, Human Trafficking and Multinational Corporations.
Fathers and Daughters: An Anthology of Exploration..
African Literature: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism.
Calibrations: Reading for the Social.
Relocating Postcolonialism.
Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice or Process?.
Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. Seeking to trace Nigerian literary history from the perspective of a Yoruba matrix of cultural resources that informed the work of the writers in the title, the book fundamentally critiqued a by-then standard idea in the field that there was a natural relationship between orality and literacy in the work of African writers and rather argued that the presence of orality in African literature was due to the exercise of strategic aesthetic choices, some of which had nothing to do with orality but more to do with the pressures of identity-formation in the evolving nation-state that is Nigeria. The book has gone on to become a classic and is to be found in all African literature survey courses worldwide.
