Cajetan Iheka
Cajetan Iheka specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, postcolonial studies, and world literatures. He serves as director of the Whitney Humanities Center and chair of the Council on African Studies at Yale. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge UP, 2018), which won the 2019 Ecocritical Book Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and the 2020 African Literature Association First Book Prize. His second monograph, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke UP, 2021), positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure. African Ecomedia received six book prizes, including the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize (formerly the Herskovits Book Prize), the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association, and the 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award. He is the only scholar to have won the Ecocritical Book Award more than once.
Professor Iheka edited the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022), and coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (University of Rochester Press, 2018) as well as Environmental Transformations, a 2020 special issue of African Literature Today. His most recent co-edited volume, Intellectual Traditions of African Literature, 1960-2015 (with Jeanne-Marie Jackson), was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2025. His third monograph, Horizontal Comparison: Africa, the Caribbean, and the Making of Black World Literature (University of Chicago Press) is forthcoming in Fall 2026.
Professor Iheka’s articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, New Literary History, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Journal of Visual Culture, and Research in African Literatures. He is editor-in-chief of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.
updated December 2025
