Book Launch of Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature: Relational Worlds
We celebrated the launch of Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature: Relational Worlds (Palgrave, 2023) by Dr Joseph Hankinson, with an online panel discussion with leading experts in African, Victorian, and Comparative Literatures. The panel will be composed of Prof. Annmarie Drury (CUNY), Prof. Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins), and Prof. Galin Tihanov (QMUL), and chaired by Prof. Matthew Reynolds (Oxford).
About Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature: Relational Worlds:
“This book compares the Victorian British poet Robert Browning and the twentieth-century Ghanaian poet and novelist Kojo Laing—two writers whose texts frequently foreground multi-scalar transregional cartographies, points of connection and translation, and imaginative kinships between different linguistic and cultural communities. Starting from the numerous and surprising points of connection and resemblance between both authors’ texts, this book puts pressure on critical practices that would keep writers like Laing and Browning separate, positing instead the importance of paying attention to the imaginative relationships texts themselves generate. Developing a completely new approach to cross-temporal and cross-cultural comparison and comparability, Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature is invested in bringing comparative literature into the twenty-first century.”
This event required registration. Please register via Eventbrite, here.
Joseph Hankinson is Career Development Lecturer in English at Jesus College, Oxford and Stipendiary Lecturer in English at The Queen’s College, Oxford. He is a member of the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT) Research Centre’s Organising Committee and co-convenor of the ‘Comparative African Literatures’ research strand. He is the author of Kojo Laing, Robert Browning and Affiliative Literature: Relational Worlds (2023) and his research has been published in journals including Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Essays in Criticism.
Annmarie Drury is Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. She is scholar and poet who translates from Swahili to English. She is the editor and translator of Stray Truths: Selected Poems of Euphrase Kezilahabi (Michigan State UP, 2015) and the author of Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge UP 2015), as well as of many poems published in Raritan, The Paris Review, and other journals.
Jeanne-Marie Jackson is Associate Professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. Her work addresses questions of comparative method, literature and philosophy, and interpretive scale, mainly in the framework of African literature and intellectual history. She is the author of The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing (Princeton UP, 2021). She is also Senior Editor of ELH, and Reviews Editor for the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry.
Galin Tihanov is the George Steiner Professor of Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of five books, most recently The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Stanford UP, 2019). His work in intellectual history and on cosmopolitanism, world literature, and exile has been widely translated. He is currently completing Cosmopolitanism: A Very Short Introduction, forthcoming with Oxford University Press.
