About

Dr. Kwame Osei-Poku is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Ghana and a scholar of African literary and cultural studies. His research is situated at the intersection of African travel writing, postcolonial studies, life writing, memory studies, and contemporary African speculative fiction. Through archival research and literary analysis, he examines the ways African intellectuals, travellers, soldiers, and writers have documented experiences of mobility, identity, colonialism, and cultural encounter.

Beyond his teaching and research, he has served the University in several leadership capacities, including Examinations Officer of the Department of English, Assistant Editor of the Legon Journal of Humanities, doctoral mentor within the Pan African Doctoral Academy, and Academic Advisor for the University’s International Programmes Office.

His scholarship combines literary criticism, archival studies, cultural history, and decolonial approaches to knowledge production, contributing to contemporary debates on African intellectual traditions, memory, mobility, and representation.

Education

• PhD in English – University of Ghana (2018)
• MPhil in English – University of Ghana (2010)
• BA in English – University of Ghana (2002–2006)

Postdoctoral Fellowship

• African Humanities Program (AHP/ACLS) Postdoctoral Fellow (2020–2021)

Research Interest

Dr. Osei-Poku’s research explores the relationship between literature, travel, identity, memory, and cultural production within African and postcolonial contexts.

His principal research interests include:

• African Travel Writing
• Auto/Biographical Writing
• Memoir Studies
• Postcolonial Literature
• African Literary and Cultural Studies
• Colonial and Postcolonial Archives
• African Intellectual History
• Decolonial Theory
• African Horror and Gothic Studies
• African Fantasy Fiction
• Afrofuturism
• Magical Realism
• Memory and Representation
• Mobility and Identity Studies
• Contemporary African Literature
• Comparative Literary Studies

A significant aspect of his scholarship investigates African-authored travel narratives published during the colonial period, examining how these texts negotiate questions of identity, ideology, race, mobility, and cultural encounter. His work demonstrates the importance of recovering African voices from archival materials and repositioning them within broader discussions of literary history and postcolonial thought.

Publications

Osei, E. A. and Osei-Poku, K. (2025). “The Birth of Man 3: Reading Rivers Solomon’s The Deep through the Lens of Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of Man.” In E. Cole (Ed.), ALT 43: Afrifuturism (pp. 65–81). Boydell & Brewer. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.28757323.9

Osei-Poku, K. and Osei-Bonsu V. (2023). “Silence as Language in Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Livingstone.” In Faraclas, N., R. Severing, C. Weijer, E. Echteld, W. Rutgers and R. Dupey. Eds. Southern Resonances: Southern Epistemologies, Southern Praxes and the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Greater Caribbean and Beyond. Vol 2, Willemstad: University of Curaçao. pp. 19-31.

Osei-Poku, K and Ankomah, E. H. (2022). In Search of the Better? The Representations of Utopia and Dystopia in Kofi Awoonor’s This Earth, My Brother… Legon Journal of Humanities DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ljh.v33i2.5, pp 109-131.

Osei-Poku, K. (2021). “The Burma Campaign from an African Perspective: Interrogating the 1944 WWII Travelogue of Sgt. F. S. Arkhurst of the Royal West African Frontier Forces (RWAFF)”. Journal of African Cultural Studies. DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2021.2002683.

Osei-Poku, K. (2020). “Adapting to life in “Strange England”: Interrogating identity and ideology from S.A.T. Taylor’s 1937 Travelogue; “An African In An English School”.Legon Journal of Humanities (Vol 31, #1), pp 63- 91.

Osei-Poku, K. (2018). “African Authored Domestic Travel Writing and Identity: A Returnee Soldier’s Impressions of Colonial Life in Takoradi (Gold Coast).” Coldnoon: Travel Poetics International Journal of Travel Writing and Travel Cultures (Vol 6, #4 Feb 2018: Dandelion Issue. O.P. Jindal Global University. 

Osei-Poku, K and Agbozo G.E. (2017). “Negotiating the Gothic in African Literature. A Study of Amos Tutuola’s Palm-Wine Drinkard and Bessie Head’s Maru. In Faraclas, N., R. Severing, C. Weijer, E. Echteld, W. Rutgers and R. Dupey. Eds. Memories of Caribbean Futures: Reclaiming the Pre-Colonial and Post-Colonial in the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Greater Caribbean and Beyond. Willemstad: University of Curaçao. pp. 123-133.

REVIEW ARTICLES IN JOURNALS

Osei-Poku, K. (2022). Postcolonial Literature Under Romantic Infusions: A Review of Romanticism and Aesthetic Life in Postcolonial Writing. Oxford University Press, 2018. doi:10.1017/pli.2021.45

Osei-Poku, K. (2020). Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism: Anglophone Literature,1950 to the Present. Eds. Richard Begam AND Michael Valdez Moses. Oxford University Press, 2019, 324 pp. doi:10.1017/pli.2020.17

Osei-Poku, K. (2021). “A Sense of Africa in The Exploration of Reminiscences: A Review of Limbe to Lagos: Nonfiction From Cameroon and Nigeria”. Africa In Words Online Literary Magazine.