I am Professor of African literature in Princeton University’s departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies. I grew up in Ethiopia and Ghana, and have been writing about African arts, literature, and politics since the 1980s. I am now working to bring attention to early African literature and how African thought has shaped global history. I have taught two Wikipedia courses, and through it my students produced articles about African intellectuals, institutions, and theories. I am the author of several research books, translations, and textbooks. One is Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success (2nd ed, 2019). With Michael Kleiner, I translated The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman (Princeton, 2015), perhaps the first African biography of an African woman. My books in progress are Ladder of Heaven: The Miracles of the Virgin Mary in Ethiopian Literature and Art and The Black Queen of Sheba: A Global History of an African Idea. You can learn more about me at my web page.
