Cajetan Iheka
Cajetan Iheka began his tenure as director of the Whitney Humanities Center (WHC) in July 2023. As the director, he is excited to promote a global vision of the humanities, deepen collaborations with campus partners, and foster opportunities for Yale’s exceptional undergraduates at the Center. Motivated by a strong dedication to community-building, Professor Iheka strives to make the WHC an inclusive space for academics, students, artists, and the broader New Haven community through the weekly fellows’ forum and various public-facing programs. Under his leadership, a commitment to intellectual excellence within a convivial environment will underpin existing programming and new initiatives at the Whitney Humanities Center. This includes Humanities Now, a new lecture series designed to spark deep thinking and smart action on current intellectual and social concerns.
Professor Iheka specializes in African literature, ecocriticism, ecomedia, and postcolonial literature. He is the author of Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency, and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the 2020 First Book Prize of the African Literature Association. His latest single-authored book is African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Duke University Press, 2021). The monograph, which positions Africa at the center of discourses on media ecologies, materiality, and infrastructure, received six book prizes. Among other accolades, African Ecomedia won the 2022 African Studies Association Best Book Prize (formerly Herskovits Book Prize), the Ecocriticism Book Award of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, and the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award of the International Studies Association. In addition to these publications, Professor Iheka is editor of the MLA volume Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media (2022). He also coedited African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space (University of Rochester Press, 2018), and Environmental Transformations, a special issue of African Literature Today.