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Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry
English
Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708
304D Allen Building, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours Spring '25 Semester:

On Leave  

Overview


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 has received a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to pursue musicology studies in support of this project.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Jaji is also a poet. Her most recent collection, Mother Tongues (2019) was awarded the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize. Both her first collection Beating the Graves (2017) and a chapbook, Carnaval (2014) were published through the African Poetry Book Fund with University of Nebraska Press. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series, Black Renaissance Noire, Almost Island, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, etc. and she has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations, among others.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry · 2023 - Present English, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Associate Professor of English · 2015 - Present English, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Associate Professor of African & African American Studies · 2021 - Present African & African American Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published December 12, 2022
Bringing Black Poetry and Music Into Dialogue
Published June 15, 2021
10 Books About Music from Duke Authors
Published April 8, 2021
Celebrate National Poetry Month with Six Duke Faculty Poets

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Recent Publications


Our Readers Write: mediating Africa Poetry's Audiences

Journal Article Research in African Literatures · 2020 Cite

Mother Tongues Poems

Book · November 15, 2019 Winner of the 2018 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize Tsitsi Ella Jaji’s second full-length collection of poems, Mother Tongues, begins at home, with the first words and loves we learn, and the most intimate vows we ... ... Cite
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Recent Grants


New Directions - Musicology

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation · 2021 - 2025

National Humanities Center Fellowship

ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Humanities Center · 2018 - 2018

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Education, Training & Certifications


Cornell University · 2009 Ph.D.