CRG African Literatures

Female, Queer and Nonbinary Voices in African Literature: Bodies, Ecologies, Herstories

University of Leicester, 8 September 2026

The CRG African Literatures was pleased to hold the conference 'Female, Queer and Nonbinary Voices in African Literature: Bodies, Ecologies, Herstories' on 8 September 2026. The conference took place at the University of Leicester and was co-organised by the CRG-AL and the University of Leicester. The full programme is available here.

About this CRG

The Collaborative Research Group (CRG) African Literatures is a forum for interdisciplinary exchange and for engaging and opening channels between African literary studies and African Studies, to promote African literature as a discipline within the larger spheres of the humanities and the social sciences. By creating a forum within the structures of AEGIS where scholars can come together and discuss research, ongoing projects and potential future collaborations, the CRG African Literatures aims to provide an infrastructure for sustaining conversation and collaboration between scholars in Europe and Africa working broadly on African literary culture/s. In order to achieve this aim, the CRG African Literatures is open to institutional participation and individual membership of African literary scholars working within or outside AEGIS member organisations.

We are a network of Europe-based Africanists and African scholars interested in African Literatures, in all forms. We believe that the study of African literatures contributes to the broader study of Africa and has the potential to challenge, complicate, and enrich our understanding of African Studies in unique ways, from unique historical, methodological and analytical perspectives.

The CRG African Literatures aims to:

  • Foster a community of (interdisciplinary) scholars focused on literary production in and from Africa, and to facilitate the sharing of information on African literary projects, events, and conversations within Europe and across Africa
  • Make visible the study of African literatures within the European African Studies sphere, and to fulfil an outreach capacity; to promote, share, and encourage engagement with works of African literature to a larger European public.

Contact

Email: africanlitcrg@gmail.com

CRG Coordinators: 

Joanna Woods 
Stockholm University
joanna.woods@english.su.se

Sreya Mallika Datta 
University of Leicester 
smd46@leicester.ac.uk

Megan Fourqurean 
City St George's, University of London
megan.fourqurean@city.ac.uk

Dorothée Boulanger 
University of Oxford
dorothee.boulanger@humanities.ox.ac.uk

How to join 

The CRG is aimed at researchers working in African literatures broadly. We invite all career level scholars to apply for membership, but we are particularly interested in engaging postgraduate students, PhDs, and early career scholars. 

To become a member and join the African Literatures CRG, please send an email to: africanlitcrg@gmail.com. In your email, please state your name, title, institutional affiliation, and area/s of expertise.

Once you have emailed us, we will add you to the mailing list, and we’ll be in touch.

Full list of members available here.

Upcoming events: 

Calls for Papers

[Conference] African Ecologies: Knowledge and Creativity for Sustainable Planetary Futures

Organisers: Kelsey McFaul (University College Dublin) and Sandrine Ndahiro (Maynooth University)
Dates: 4-5 March 2027
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Submission deadline: 15 December 2026
Full CFP available here.

 

[Conference] Affective Worlds: Emotions and Aesthetics in Afro-Descendant Women's Writing 

Organisers: Isabella Villanova and Elisabeth Bekers (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Dates: 24-25 May 2027
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Submission deadline: 10 January 2027
Full CFP available here.

 

[Publication] Imagining Decolonial Ecologies

Journal: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS)
Special issue editor: Kata Gyuris
Submission deadline: 31 January 2027
Full CFP available here.

 

 

Please do get in touch and let us know if there are calls or events that we can feature here on the African Literatures CRG page. You can contact us via email: africanlitcrg@gmail.com

 
Highlights: 

Membership Research News

Dr Isabella Villanova began her Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant Agreement 101212133) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in September 2025. Her research project, AFROPEMOTIONS, is funded by the MSCA (2025-27) and FWO (2027-28) and will be carried out within the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, with secondments at the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) ​Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin, the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung in Berlin, and the Centre for Social and Cultural Psychology at Katholieke Universieit Leuven.

AFROPEMOTIONS explores the cultural and political implications of emotions in Afro-European (Afropean) women's fiction. It examines how these narratives foreground the complex emotional experiences produced by intersecting forms of oppression often rooted in colonial legacies, and develops a theoretical model for the thematic and formal analysis of emotional entanglements in fiction. For more information, visit the project page as well as its profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and X.

Dr Villanova also published her monograph, The Politics of Gender in Nigerian and Zimbabwean Women's Fiction: Agencies and Strategies of Resistance, in July 2026. The book is based on her doctoral thesis. It explores issues of gender and resistance while historicising and emphasising the literary legacies and genealogies of Anglophone African women's writing across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The monograph compares twelve novels published between 1972 and 2018 by Buchi Emecheta, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Yvonne Vera. Further information about the book is available here.

Dr Marta Fossati has recently begun a Global Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (Grant Agreement 1010284002), where she will undertake the project COMPLICANON - Local Reception, Translocal Narratives: Complicating the South African English Canon at the University of Milan, Italy and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. The fellowship is funded by the European Commission through the Research Executive Agency (REA), and will run from September 2026 to August 2029. Dr. Fossati will be supervised by Prof. Christopher Thurman (WITS) and Prof. Giuliana Iannaccaro (UNIMI). 

COMPLICANON investigates a corpus of contemporary South African fiction in English and its local reception through literary awards and book clubs. Combining literary analysis and archival methods with empirical research, this project aims to foreground the role of local communities of interpretation in the emergence of a more inclusive corpus of South African literature that challenges the image of a "South African English canon" sanctioned in the global stage. For more information, visit the project page and Instagram, and Dr. Fossati's ORCID profile.

Dr Dawit Dibekulu Alem (Bahir Dar University) has published the article "Proverbs of Belonging: Relational Ecologies in Yoruba, Hausa, and Akan Land Proverbs" in Human Ecology, co-authored with Drs Ayenew Guadu and Waltenigus Mekonnen (Bahir Dar University). This article explores relational ecologies in Yoruba, Hausa, and Akan land proverbs, highlighting how Indigenous proverbial knowledge articulates belonging between people and the land. It contributes to African literary and cultural studies through a comparative, ecocritical lens. 

Full citation: Guadu, Ayenew, Dawit Dibekulu and Waltenigus Mekonnen, "Proverbs of Belonging: Relational Ecologies in Yoruba, Hausa, and Akan Land Proverbs", Human Ecology, 54.102 (2026), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-026-00771-5.