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).