Yogita Goyal (she/her) is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of two monographs: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. Her research and teaching explore the relation between race and empire, nation and diaspora, and past and present in a broad range of African diaspora literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Most of her work foregrounds the articulation of literary form with social and political change, with a view to rethinking questions of social justice and ethics in historical and continuing forms of inequality.

Edited works include a special issue of Research in African Literatures (2014), the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017), and the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (2023), as well as co-edited special issues of American Literary History (2022) and Representations (2023). Past President of A.S.A.P. (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present), and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature (2015-2022), she is writing a book called “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found,” and serving as Associate Editor of American Literary History.

Goyal received a Distinguished Teaching Award and the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching from UCLA (2022), an ACLS fellowship (2016-2017), the University of California President’s Office Faculty Fellowship (2007-2008), and an NEH grant as Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, (2003-2004). She regularly teaches classes on slavery and migration, African diaspora literature, the global novel, and postcolonial theory.