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University Distinguished LectureBiographical DataF. Abiola Irele Professor F. Abiola Irele, formerly Professor of French and Head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, is currently Professor of African, French and Comparative Literature at The Ohio State University. He has an Honours degree in English of the University of London, and a doctorate degree of the University of Paris (Sorbonne). Before joining Ohio State, Professor Irele taught at various universities in Africa and the Caribbean. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Dakar during the 1979-1980 academic year, and Overseas Fellow, Churchill College, University of Cambridge in 1999. He delivered the McMillan-Stewart Lectures at Harvard University in April 2001, under the title Black Utopia. Professor Irele's publications include an edition of selected poems by the Senegalese poet and statesman, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a collection of critical essays, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, and an edition of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Professor Irele is also the author of numerous articles on African and Caribbean literature in English and French and has written extensively on francophone African philosophy, on which he contributed an entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A collection of his essays entitled The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, was published in the summer of 2001 by Oxford University Press. He is a contributing editor to the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and is currently working on a study of Léopold Sédar Senghor for the series "Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature," of which he is general editor. Since 1992, he has been editor of the journal Research in African Literatures. |
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