He was the Louise Durham Mead Professor of English and Wole Soyinka Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In his 18 years at UW–Madison, he served as department chair of African Cultural Studies, as well as a Senior Fellow and Interim Director at the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He was an internationally-recognized scholar of African, African American, and Caribbean literatures, post-colonial studies, genre studies and popular culture studies.
Office of Strategic Communication