Research
My primary and broad research interests span Literary and Cultural Theory and Criticism, Aesthetics and Politics, and Literature and Philosophy. I completed my MA with a dissertation on "Relevance Theory and The Rhetoric of Narrative Suspense" under the supervision of Professor Michael Toolan, and my PhD with a thesis on the "Pollinating Mesh: The Ecological Thought in Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction" with a comparison to some African fictions, under the supervision of Professors Brigitta Olubas, Elizabeth McMahon and Bill Ashcroft. My thesis aimed to establish how the mesh or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, humans and nonhumans, pollinates this literature and how the aesthetics of these texts warrants their reading as sites of these enmeshments. It thus engaged Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, ontologies, or metaphysics to establish how these underpin Indigenous literature and frame its reading. To attend to the global pertinence of both the texts under study and the ecological thought as the main conceptual framework, the thesis engaged Object Oriented Ontology and adjacent theories of the ontological turn alongside transnational Indigenous critical thought.
Shaped by this doctoral research, my current research is on multilingual Environmental and Energy Humanities in the context of Comparative Black and Indigenous Race, Cultures, Literatures and Arts, with specific focus on their epistemologies, (eco)aesthetic and poetics, as well as their relevance for contemporary global challenges-oriented policies. My work uses an intersubjective ethnographical approach for a (renovated) critical reading of Indigenous literature, grounded within Indigenous cultures and values, and developed through meaningful interpersonal relations. I bring African Indigenous theories of knowledge into conversation with both other world Indigenous forms of knowledge creation and the post-Enlightenment forms of critical thinking that underpin much contemporary environmental discourse and policy development.
My postdoctoral research has been funded by the British Academy. I have been working as a co-investigator on a collaborative British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented Research Grant on Power and Voice in Climate Change, titled "Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Land and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC, jointly with Sarah Arens (University of Liverpool), Nicola Thomas (University of Lancaster), Blake Ewing (University of Nottingham) and Emery Mudinga (ISDR/Bukavu). As for my current project, it is funded as a British Academy International fellowship and titled "Climate, Culture and Meaning: Rethinking Time, Place and Knowledge in Congo Rainforest Fiction" Las but not least, I am also a recipient of the 2025 Balzan Colloquium Award, fully funded by Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature, for presenting my work at the institute’s colloquium on Literary Responses to Ecological Crisis.