Simon Gikandi
James Ogude
Ndirangu Wachanga
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Wanjiku wa Ngũgĩ
Mumbi wa Ngũgĩ
Ndũcũ wa Ngũgĩ
Nyambura Sallinen
Wangũi wa Goro
Karen Lawrence
Colette LaBouff
Angela Davis
Adriana Johnson
Mukul Kumar
Carla Wilson
Paa Kwesi-Heto
Akosua Adomako Ampofo
Chimee Adịọha
Baba Badji
Jaye Austin Williams
Cilas Kemedjio
Anindo Marshall
Kwame Rĩgĩĩ
Nii Armah Sowah
Sela Adjei
Victor Nani Agbeli
Mumbi Ngũgĩ
Fred Moten
Jimmy Centeno
Idza Luhumyo
Bwesigye Bwa-Mwesigire
Rah Hite
Tyrus Miller
Jane O. Newman
Jerry Lee
Ketu Katrak
Gabriele Schwab
David Theo Goldberg
Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan
Cecelia Lynch
S. Ama Wray
Munyao Kilolo
Glaydah Namukasa
Joel Veenstra







Conference Speakers







Simon Gikandi





Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University. He is a scholar of the literatures 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 was President of the MLA in 2019-2020. His many books and articles include Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a Choice Outstanding Academic Publication for 2004. His book Slavery and the Culture of Tastewas 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, volume 11 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a corresponding member of the British Academy.










James Ogude





James Ogude, a former student of Ngugi at Nairobi University in the 1970s, is a Professor of African Literature and cultures, and was the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria from 2017 to 2024. He continues to serve as Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the same centre. He is the current Director of the African regional hub of the BRIDGES Coalition in the UNESCO Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), located at the University of Pretoria. Before moving to the University of Pretoria, he was a Professor of African Literature and Cultures in the School of Literature, Language and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, serving as the Head of African Literature and also Assistant Dean – Research, in the Faculty of Humanities. His research interests include, postcolonial literatures, popular cultures in Africa and more recently, Ubuntu and African ecologies. He recently concluded a five-year project on the Southern African philosophical concept of Ubuntu funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and currently the Principal Investigator of the Andrew Mellon funded supra-national project on African Urbanities, which brings together scholars from the universities of Ghana, Makerere, Cape Town and Pretoria. He is the author of Ngugi's Novels and African History. He has edited nine books and one anthology of African stories. His most recent edited volumes include, Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community (Indiana UP, 2019); Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation (Routledge, 2023) and a co-edited volume (with Neil Kortenaar) titled: African Literature in Transition: The Archive of African Literature 1800 – 2000 (Cambridge UP). He recently completed a commissioned volume on Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Context by Cambridge University Press, now in production. He is a board member of African Studies Association, among others. He is an A rated scientist by the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF).








Ndirangu Wachanga





Ndirangu Wachanga is a Professor of Media Studies and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin. He is the authorized documentary biographer of Ali A. Mazrui, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Micere Githae Mugo. His documentary projects preserve African memory by capturing voices and histories through visual and audio technologies.

His most recent publication is the Swahili translation of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s epic The Perfect Nine, published as Tisa Timilifu (2025). He also edited Making Life Sing in Pursuit of Utu: Essays in Honor of Micere Githae Mugo (2022) and co-edited Ngũgĩ: Reflections on a Life of Writing with Simon Gikandi (2018). His earlier works include Growing up in a Shrinking World: How Politics, Culture and the Nuclear Age Defined the Biography of Ali A. Mazrui (2017).

Wachanga’s documentaries include Make Life Sing (2024) and Ali Mazrui: A Walking Triple Heritage, which won the 2015 New York African Studies Book Award. He is currently producing films on the Gambian kora player, Sona Jobarteh, and on poet and civil rights activist Sonia Sanchez.

His journalistic work has appeared on international media networks including the BBC and Voice of America. His research interests focus on memory, documentation, and communication technologies. He is currently completing two book projects: Memory and the African Intellectual Imaginary: Biography as Method and Voice and Social Justice: The Works of Micere Githae Mugo.

Wachanga’s media library can be accessed at https://www.wachangaproductions.com/about








Wanjikũ wa Ngũgĩ





Wanjikū wa Ngūgī has a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Georgia State University. She is a faculty member at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, MFA in Fiction, and former director of the Helsinki African Film Festival (HAFF). Wanjikũ is the author of Seasons in Hippoland (Seagull Books, 2021) and The Fall of Saints (Atria Books, 2014). Her short stories and non-fiction essays have appeared in Nairobi Noir (2020), Houston Noir, (2019), New Daughters of Africa (2019), The Barelife Review (2019), St. Petersburg Review amongst others. She was also a columnist for the Finnish magazine Maailman Kuvalehti and served as a juror for the CinenAfrica Film Festival, Sweden.








Ndũcũ wa Ngũgĩ





Dr. Ndũcũ wa Ngũgĩ,  the Ngũgĩ Family Spokesperson, is a prize-winning author and scholar. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Black Studies from Oberlin College in Ohio, a Master of Education (M.Ed.), and an Education Specialist (Ed.S.) in Teacher Leadership from Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia. He holds a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree from Molloy University. His interests are focused on food insecurity and families’ coping mechanisms, exploring how families navigate food scarcity and what educators can learn from their resilience. He is the recipient of the Sandra Day Morris Award.

Dr. Ndũcũ is the author of City Murders, The Dead Came Calling, Benji’s Big Win, and Benji’s Mountain Adventure.  Benji’s Big Win won the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature in 2022. His forthcoming titles, Benji Goes to Town and The Enemy Lay Within, are forthcoming (EAEP, 2026).

He serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Foundation. He is also a founding member of the Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o Cultural and Arts Center.

Dr. Ndũcũ lives on Long Island, New York, with his wife, Dr. Grace Nyambura, and daughter, Nyambura wa Ndũcũ.








Wangũi wa Goro





Wangũi wa Goro (PhD) is a distinguished interdisciplinary scholar, translator, and public intellectual renowned for her pioneering work in literary translation and advocacy for African languages and literatures. She was the first PhD scholar in Translation Studies in the UK where she pioneered the discipline alongside global luminaries of literary translation. She has made significant contributions to translation studies and practice through teaching, editing, and cultural curation,

Pioneering translation scholar and cultural curator: 
Wangũi wa Goro has taught translation for many years, including co-developing the UK's first literary translation Master’s degree, leading the African Translation Masterclass in different parts of the world and with global online communities; and curating translation festivals in different parts of the world. She holds honorary and visiting professorships at SOAS and King’s College, London and has extensive experience of working as Editor in international development for many years.

Acclaimed translator: 
She is celebrated for translating Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari and his three children’s books in the Njamba Nene Series from Gĩkũyũ, and Veronique Tadjo’s As the Crow Flies from French, alongside her work as a translation theorist and practioner, writer, poet, editor, and promoter of intercultural dialogue which she had conducted for over forty years through SIDENSI. Her creative and scholarly works have been widely published and recognized globally. She has continued to experiment across genres and languages, including in Gĩkũyũ, Kiswahili, French, English and Italian.

Commitment to African languages and global translation advocacy: 
Wangũi’s career focuses on safeguarding African languages and world literatures via translation and traducture, inspired by prominent intellectuals and leaders including Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’ through whose work she earned global acclaim as a translator. She has served in leadership roles in multiple translation and academic associations and advisory bodies in different parts of the world, promoting transnational intersectional freedom and cultural practice through her hobbies, reading and translation.












Karen Lawrence





Karen R. Lawrence assumed her current position as the ninth president of The Huntington in 2018, following a decade as president at Sarah Lawrence College. This marks her return to Southern California, where she led the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, as its dean from 1998 to 2007. Throughout her career, as scholar, teacher, and administrative leader, she has been a forceful advocate for the liberal arts.

As Dean of Humanities, Lawrence championed the creation of the International Center for Writing and Translation in 2002, brainstorming with the center’s major donor, UC Irvine alumnus Glenn Schaeffer, and UCI faculty to craft and support the Center’s mission, establishing its illustrious advisory and executive boards, and recruiting its distinguished inaugural director, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 

Overseeing 207 acres, 600 staff, and 1.1 M visitors annually at The Huntington, Lawrence has fostered greater access to its three world-renowned collections—library, art, and botanical gardens—shepherded major acquisitions; enhanced the Huntington Research Fellowship program; and expanded educational programming onsite and online. She has initiated transformative capital projects, including an 83,000 square-foot new Library/Art building and renovated Main Exhibition Hall, and a residential housing complex on campus for visiting Research fellows.

President Lawrence is a renowned English and Irish literature scholar who has written widely on 20th-century literature, particularly on the work of James Joyce; women and travel; experimental writing; and higher education.








Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak







Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a distinguished scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic who holds the rank of University Professor at Columbia University in New York. Educated at the University of Calcutta and later earning her PhD at Cornell, she rose to international prominence through her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which included a translator’s preface that set new standards for self-reflexivity in theoretical work. Over the decades, Spivak has built an intellectual repertoire spanning postcolonial theory, feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction—a hybridity of disciplines that reflects her own self-description as a “practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist.” 

Her work focuses especially on the figure of the “subaltern” (as originally theorised by Antonio Gramsci) and on how women and marginalised subjects in post-colonial contexts are shaped by, and resist, global structures of power and representation. One of her most-cited essays, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), asks whether the most vulnerable are ever truly able to “speak” within dominant academic and political discourses. Spivak has coined influential concepts such as “strategic essentialism”, and her major book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) explores how European metaphysical traditions exclude non-European subjects. She has received many honours—among them the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2012), India’s Padma Bhushan (2013), and the Holberg Prize (2025) for her groundbreaking contributions to literary theory and philosophy.








Akosua Adomako Ampofo 







Akosua Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies, and a former Director of the Institute of African Studies and the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Ghana. A feminist, activist scholar, her work on African Knowledges, Gender and Masculinities, and Popular Culture is informed by a commitment to social justice.  In 2022 she co-produced the award-winning documentary on women’s activism in Ghana, When Women Speak, with Kate Skinner and directed by Aseye Tamakloe.  Adomako Ampofo is the founding vice-president and immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa, and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023-2024 she was the Wangari Maathai Visiting Professor at the University of Kassel. She is the 2025 Claude Ake Chair at the Nordic Africa Institute and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. In 2024 she established 715House Productions, a creative media company, with her daughter, Akosua-Asamoabea Ampofo, dedicated to reshaping narratives about (global) Africa. A lifelong learner, Akosua is pursuing an NYU in Business of Entertainment certificate with the Tisch Shool of the Arts.





The Celebration of the Life and Work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is made possible through the support of the:

UCI Office of the Chancellor
Dean of the School of the Arts
Dean of the School of Humanities
Dean of the School of Social Sciences
Humanities Center
International Center for Writing and Translation
UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality
Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies
Office of Inclusive Excellence
UCI Illuminations: The Chancellor's Arts & Culture Initiative
Alex Glasser The Center for the Power of Music and Social Change
Department of Anthropology
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of Drama
Department of English
Department of Dance

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Organized by:

Adriana Johnson
Jane O. Newman
Gabriele Schwab
Ketu Katrak
Jerry Lee
Cecelia Lynch
S. Ama Wray