State University of New York Distinguished Professor
of Africana Studies, English, & Comparative Literature
at Binghamton University.

Born in Nigeria, Isidore Okpewho has a B.A. in Honors Classics from the University of London, a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Denver, and a D.Lit. in the Humanities from the University of London. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo (1974-76), University of Ibadan (1976-90), Harvard University (1990-91), and Binghamton University (since 1991).

Okpewho’s areas of specialization are in African and comparative literatures, with a specialist emphasis on comparative oral traditions. His major publications in this field include The Epic in Africa: Toward a Poetics of the Oral Performance (1979), Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance (1983), African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character, and Continuity (1992), and Once Upon a Kingdom: Myth, Hegemony, and Identity (1998). His edited scholarly volumes reveal an expansion of his academic interests from oral literature (The Oral Performance in
Africa, 1990), to modern African literature (The Heritage of African Poetry, 1985; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart: A Casebook, 2003) and diaspora studies (The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, 1999). He is currently completing a book on an African epic under the title Blood on the Delta: Art, Culture, and Society in The Ozidi Saga, as well as working on a new book project African Mythology in the New World. He has also published some four dozen journal and book articles in these areas.

Professor Okpewho is also an active novelist with four titles, The Victims (1970), The Last Duty, winner of the African Arts Prize for Literature (1976), Tides, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa (1993), and Call Me By My Rightful Name (2004). He is gradually developing his fifth novel, Fish Scales. >Read more