Simon Gikandi Named PMLA Editor

At its October meeting, the MLA Executive Council appointed Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English at Princeton University, to serve as the next editor of PMLA. His term begins in July 2011 and runs for three years. He will succeed Patricia Yaeger, whose term as editor will end on 30 June 2011.

Gikandi received his PhD in English from Northwestern University. Before coming to the United States, he earned an MLitt in English Studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a BA (First Class Honors) from the University of Nairobi in Kenya, where he was born. He is the author of Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature; Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism; and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. He is the coauthor of The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English since 1945, the coeditor of The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, and the editor of The Encyclopedia of African Literature.