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Dr. Vincent R. Ogoti is an Assistant Professor of English and Global Black Studies at Clemson University, SC. He was Andrew W. Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Humanities and Storytelling and Community Access Fellow at Madison Youth Arts Center (MYArts), 2022-2023. He was also the Inaugural African Studies Program Fellow at UW-Madison, 2020-2022, and a Fulbright Fellow at Yale University, 2014-2015. His scholarship focuses on biopolitics, violence, and subjectivity, with a primary emphasis on African, African American, and Caribbean literature and drama.

Ogoti earned his PhD in African Cultural Studies and History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MA in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame.

His research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of the African Literature Association, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Brittle Paper, and Nordic Journal of African Studies.

Dr. Ogoti is a playwright and has authored and co-produced four plays. His most recent play, A Shadow in the Sun, problematizes challenging issues such as gender and sexuality and their representation in art to demonstrate that when society encounters issues that are not amenable to any easy solution, it should appeal to moral imagination:

“The capacity to imagine ourselves in a web of relationships that include our enemies; the ability to sustain a paradoxical curiosity that embraces complexity without reliance on dualistic polarity; the fundamental belief in and pursuit of the creative act; and the acceptance of the inherent risk of stepping into the mystery of the unknown that lies beyond the far too familiar landscape of violence” (John Paul Lederach)

Dr. Ogoti is also the curator of the Peace Narratives Lab, which develops strategic peace narratives in contexts with competing conflict narratives.