Ato Quayson is a Ghanaian-Canadian literary critic and the Jean G and Morris M Dolye Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies and English at Stanford University, where he is the inaugural chair of the Department of African and African American Studies.
12 Facts About Ato Quayson
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Ato Quayson was Chair of the Department of English from 2021 to 2023.
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Ato Quayson was formerly a Professor of English at New York University, and before that was University Professor of English and inaugural Director of the Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Toronto.
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Ato Quayson taught at the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge for a decade before moving to the University of Toronto.
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Ato Quayson is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Ato Quayson was Chief Examiner in English of the International Baccalaureate, and has been a member of the Diaspora and Migrations Project Committee of the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK, and of the European Research Council award grants panel on culture and cultural production.
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Ato Quayson is a former President of the African Studies Association.
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Ato Quayson went on to Oxford University as a Junior Research Fellow, before returning to Cambridge as a Fellow at Pembroke College and a member of the Faculty of English, where he eventually became a Reader in Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.
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Ato Quayson was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar from 1991 to 1994 and is a Fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Society and has held fellowships at the W E B Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and the Research Centre in the Humanities at the Australian National University.
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Ato Quayson has lectured widely in Singapore, Hong Kong, Turkey, Australia, Israel, and across Africa, Europe, and the United States.
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Ato Quayson is founding editor of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and was chair of the judges for the 2015 Etisalat Prize for Literature.
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Ato Quayson served on the board of the Noma Book Award, Africa's 100 Best Book Selection Panel, and several other literary juries and panels.