SIGNS OF THE TIMES: DISCOURSE ECOLOGIES AND STREET LIFE ON OXFORD ST., ACCRA
Lecture | April 23 | 12:30-3 p.m. | Barrows Hall, Lipman Room, 8th floor

Speaker: ATO QUAYSON, Professor, English & Director, Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
Sponsors: Center for African Studies, Department of African American Studies, Institute for the Study of Social Change, Center for Race and Gender

BACKGROUND
Professor Ato Quayson has been at the University of Toronto, since August 2005. He did his BA at the University of Ghana and took his PhD from Cambridge University in 1995. He then went on to the University of Oxford as a Research Fellow, returning to Cambridge in September 1995 to become a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.

He was elected to a five-year term on the Modern Language Association's executive committee of the Division on Postcolonial Studies and Literature in Culture in 2008 and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in December 2005. Prof Quayson was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991-994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society. In 2004 he held a Fellowship at the Du Bois Institute for African-American Studies at Harvard University. He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley and has lectured widely in places such as Istanbul, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Cape Town, Bergen, and on many campuses in the US, the UK, and in Europe more generally.

Prof Quayson was the Chief Examiner in English for the International Baccalaureate and sits on the Commissioning Panel of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of the United Kingdom as well as on various other academic bodies and organisations. He was ellected to a five-year term on the Modern Language Association's executive committee of the Division on Postcolonial Studies and Literature in Culture in 2008 and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in December 2005.

CURRENT RESEARCH
The project is interdisciplinary, taking in insights from urban studies, anthropology, history, and political science among others. It is a mixture between a personal memoir and a biography of the city of Accra from the focal point of "Oxford Street", perhaps the most globalized street in the country.

Attendance restrictions: Free and open to the public.

Event Contact: 510-642-8338
http://events.berkeley.edu/index.php/calendar/sn/asc.html?event_ID=16798...