- 287 - Climate Ideologies
- 40-02 - Introductory Topics in Literature
Ph.D., Columbia University, 2022
A.B., Princeton University
Akua A. Banful’s research examines climate as an ecological modality and a discursive construct in the workings of empire and Atlantic world slavery. Her book project, Constructing the Tropics: Post-Imperial Discourses of Climate, explores ideological and political resonances of nineteenth and twentieth-century figurations of the tropics in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Banful’s writing has appeared and is forthcoming in The Senses and Society, The Journal of Literature of Medicine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and BOMB Magazine.
Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial literary studies, African and black diasporic literatures and cultural production, translation, climate arts, marine mammals, and political theory and philosophy. Prior to her appointment at UC Davis, she was the Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality from 2020-22. She also served as a Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellow from 2019-2020. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and an A.B. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University.