Neighbor News
Abiola Irele: An Identity of Passions Negritude in the Black and Postcolonial World
Professor Francis Abiola Irele will be giving a lecture at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College on Feb. 9 at 7:00 PM.
Tuesday, February 9th at 7:00 PM at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College
Francis Abiola Irele, formerly Professor of French, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, was for several years Professor of African, French, and Comparative Literature at the Ohio State University. After retiring from Ohio State in 2003, he became Visiting Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University before moving back to Nigeria. Among his many publications are The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (edited with Simon Gikandi) and two collections of essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology and The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora. He is a contributing editor to The Norton Anthology of World Literature and General Editor of the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature series. (source: W.W. Norton and Company)
Irele has been called the doyen of Africanist literary scholars worldwide. In 1960 he graduated from Ibadan University, and immediately after graduation, he went to Paris to learn French and completed a Ph.D in French at the University of Paris, Sorbonne in 1966. He held teaching positions at the University of Ghana, University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), and University of Ibadan. Irele is also a former provost of Kwara State University in Ilorin, Nigeria,which recently established the Abiola Irele School of Theory and Criticism in his honor.
