Cajetan Iheka

Cajetan Iheka specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His latest single-authored book is African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). The monograph, which positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure, received several awards. It won the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication in the Humanities. African Ecomedia was also awarded Honorable Mention for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Media Ecology Association Book Awards. Professor Iheka is editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022). He also coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.

Professor Iheka is currently working on a comparative study of the cultural and formal intimacies of African and Caribbean literatures. He is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of African Studies Review, the multidisciplinary journal of the African Studies Association.