Maik Nwosu

Maik Nwosu is Professor of English and chair of the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, Colorado. He worked as a journalist (and received the Nigeria Media Merit Award for Journalist of the Year) before moving to Syracuse University, New York for a Ph.D in English and Textual Studies. His research areas include African, African Diaspora, postcolonial, and world literatures; semiotics and critical theory. Nwosu is a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; the Civitella Ranieri Center, Umbertide, Italy; and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch, South Africa.


Nwosu's academic essays have appeared in several journals and books, including English in Africa; Research in African Literatures; Texts, Tasks, and Theories: Versions and Subversions in African Literatures; Journal of Postcolonial Writing; Transnational Literature; Commonwealth Essays and Studies; Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies; Critical Insights: Cultural Encounters; and Journal of Narrative Theory. His book, Markets of Memories: Between the Postcolonial and the Transnational (Africa World Press, 2011), explores the traveling sign in the context of cultural-ideological intersections and in relation to selected works by Christopher Okigbo, Derek Walcott, James Joyce, and Isabel Allende. He has also published a coedited book, The Critical Imagination in African Literature: Essays in Honor of Michael J. C. Echeruo (Syracuse University Press, 2015) and a study of Africa’s carnivalesque poetics of laughter, The Comic Imagination in Modern African Literature and Cinema: A Poetics of Laughter (Routledge, 2016).

Nwosu’s creative works include a poetry collection, Suns of Kush; three novels — Invisible Chapters, Alpha Song, and A Gecko’s Farewell; and a collection of short stories, Return to Algadez.