Prof James Ogude is a Professor of African Literature and cultures, and the Director of the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, University of Pretoria. He is the current Director of the African regional hub of the BRIDGES Coalition in the UNESCO Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), located at the University of Pretoria. Before moving to the University of Pretoria, he was a Professor of African Literature and Cultures in the School of Literature, Language and Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, serving as the Head of African Literature and also an Assistant Dean – Research, in the Faculty of Humanities.
His research interests include, postcolonial literatures, popular cultures in Africa and more recently, Ubuntu and African ecologies. He recently concluded a five-year project on the Southern African philosophical concept of Ubuntu funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and currently the Principal Investigator of a Mellon funded supra-national project on African Urbanities, which brings together scholars from the universities of Ghana, Makerere, and UCT. He is the author of Ngugi’s Novels and African History. He has edited nine books and one anthology of African stories. His most recent edited volumes include, Ubuntu and the Reconstitution of Community (Indiana UP, 2019) and Environmental Humanities of Extraction in Africa: Poetics and Politics of Exploitation (Routledge, 2023). He is A2 rated scientist by the NRF.