Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English at Princeton University.  He specializes in the literatures, arts, and cultures of Africa and its diasporas in Europe and the Americas. He was editor of PMLA, the official journal of the Modern Language Association from 2011 to 2016 and President of the Modern Language Association in 2019-2020. His books include Reading the African Novel, Reading Chinua Achebe, Writing in Limbo, Maps of Englishness, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Slavery and the Culture of Taste, winner of both the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Award and of the African Studies Association Melville J. Herskovits Award. He is the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature, coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, and editor of The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950. He is completing Imagining Decolonization: African Literature and its Public and Otherwise Modernism: The Aesthetic of Global Blackness. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy.