Brendon Nicholls is Director of Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) and Associate Professor of Postcolonial African Studies in the School of English, University of Leeds. He is co-Chair of the university’s Africa Strategy Group, and sits on the Worldwide Universities Network Global Africa Group. He is on the Board of AEGIS, the Africa Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies. Recently, Brendon has been very involved in the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations, which has included a visit to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Africa in Westminster, where he met Lord Paul Boateng. With Anna Mdee, Brendon co-ordinated led the academic programme for the University of Leeds’ Africa Week conference.

 

Brendon’s research interests are in the Anglophone and non-Anglophone literatures of Africa, and in Postcolonial Studies more broadly. He has published a monograph, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading, an edited collection on Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People. Brendon’s articles appear in New Formations, Cultural Critique, English in Africa, Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, Research in African Literatures, and African Identities. He has book chapters forthcoming on Ngugi for Cambridge University Press and on Jacques Lacan and Bessie Head for the Annals of Theoretical Psychology. Brendon was 2022 Hugh Le May Fellow at Rhodes University and will be 2025 Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS).

 

Brendon has recently delivered keynote addresses at the Universities of Southampton, Shimla and Nigeria, Nsukka. Read more about his work here: Exploring African knowledges through literature | Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures | University of Leeds