College of Education and Behavioral Sciences News

Dr. Ato Quayson, winner of the 2021 Warren-Brooks Award, will visit WKU on Friday, September 16, to accept the award and give a guest lecture on his award-winning book, Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021). The event will take place at 3 p.m. in Cherry Hall 125 and is being co-sponsored by the English Department and the African American Studies Program. All are invited to attend.

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature was selected by a committee of the Robert Penn Warren Circle as the 2021 winner of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for outstanding literary scholarship and criticism. The book examines tragedy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day, while exploring the themes of suffering and ethics in postcolonial literature in order to expand the terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. 

Dr. Quayson is the Jean G. and Morris M. Doyle Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies and Professor of English at Stanford University. He has published six monographs and eight edited volumes. His monographs include Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing (1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice, or Process? (2000), Calibrations: Reading for the Social (2003), Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (2007) and Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism (2014), which was named in The Guardian as one of the 10 Best Books on Cities in 2014. 

Dr. Quayson has held Fellowships at the Du Bois Institute for African American Studies at Harvard (2004), and the Research Centre in the Humanities at Australian National University (2015). He was the 2011-12 Cornille Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College and is founding editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. He was President of the African Studies Association (2019-2020) and is an elected Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and of the British Academy.

Dr. Quayson has lectured widely in Africa, Europe, Canada, the United States, Singapore, Turkey, Hong Kong, Australia, and various other places.

The Warren-Brooks Award, presented each year by the Robert Penn Warren Center at Western Kentucky University, was established by the Warren family to honor an outstanding work of literary scholarship that embodies the spirit, scope, and integrity of the work produced by Warren and his frequent collaborator, Brooks. 

For information, contact Marla Zubel, rpw.center@wku.edu