Tsitsi Ella Jaji
Associate Professor of English

Jaji is an associate professor of English at Duke University with expertise in African and African American literary and cultural studies, with special interests in music, poetry, and black feminisms. She previously taught at University of Pennsylvania and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and National Humanities Center.

Her book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize, as well as honorable mentions from the American Comparative Literature Association and Society for Ethnomusicology. The book traces how exchanges between African American, Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African artists shaped cultural and political liberation projects. She is now at work on two new projects: Cassava Westerns is a study of how global Black writers and artists reimagine the American frontier myth to serve new, local purposes. The second, Classic Black is a study of poetry set to music by black concert music composers. 

Jaji, originally from Zimbabwe, is also a poet. Her collection, Beating the Graves (2017) was published through the African Poetry Book Fund with University of Nebraska Press  and her chapbook Carnaval, (2014)  appears in  New Generation African Poets box set. Her poems have appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, Illuminations, Madison Review, ElevenEleven, etc. and she has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations, among others.

Current Appointments & Affiliations

Contact Information

Some information on this profile has been compiled automatically from Duke databases and external sources. (Our About page explains how this works.) If you see a problem with the information, please write to Scholars@Duke and let us know. We will reply promptly.