Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of two monographs: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. She is also the guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Literatures (2014), editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017), and Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (2023), co-editor of a special issue of American Literary History on “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees” (2022), of Representations on “Anticolonialism as Theory” (2023), and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature (2015-2022). Her work has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and the UC President’s Office, and she is the recipient of UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. Past President of A.S.A.P., the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and U.S. literature and is working on “Aesthetics of Refuge,” a monograph on twenty-first century refugee literature and culture, and “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found,” a study of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival.

—Photo: Yinka Shonibare CBE, The British Library