Stephanie Newell

Steph Newell is Director of Graduate Studies for the African Studies program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and a professor in the English Department at Yale. Her research interests include African print cultures, with particular attention to media audiences and readerships in colonial West Africa. She is the author of six books on West African literatures and cultural history, including, most recently, Histories of Dirt: Media and Urban Life in Colonial and Postcolonial Lagos. Her other monographs are Ghanaian Popular Fiction: ‘Thrilling Discoveries in Conjugal Life’, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, West African Literatures: Ways of Reading, The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku, and The Power to Name: A History of Anonymity in Colonial West Africa. 

Her current project, Newsprint Worlds: Local Literary Creativity in Colonial West Africa, focuses on the central role of African-owned newspapers in creating platforms and publics for the earliest West African creative writers in English.