Christopher Ouma

After my PhD in the Department of African Literature at University of the Witwatersrand, I joined UCT in 2012 as a lecturer in African and African Diasporic literatures and Cultures. My research has recently consolidated itself into two major projects: The first project is on literary childhood studies and it looks at childhood as a set of ideas that shapes the imagination of identity in contemporary Africa and its diasporas. It examines various facets of childhood, which include childhoods of war, queer childhoods, diaspora childhoods and various spatio-temporalities of childhood in Cold War and late twentieth Century Africa and its diasporas. This project has recently been the subject of the book Childhood in Contemporary African Diasporic Literature: Memories and Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) under the series on African Histories and Modernities at Palgrave. The second project titled Small/Little/Literary Magazines and Pan-African Imagination, 1955-1975 , looks at the small magazine in Africa as a platform that helped triangulate the encounter between decolonization, anti-apartheid activism and the Cold War, through fostering Pan-African cultural practices. This archival project situates itself between literary history and cultural studies and is currently developing as my second monograph.