I grew up in Kenya, speaking Kikamba, Kiswahili, English, and later, during my high school years, picked up Gikuyu and Kiembu. Like so many African children who grow up in an environment where many languages and cultures coexist, my whole life experience was a dress rehearsal for comparative study--although I never imagined being a comparatist! After a B.Ed. and MA from Kenyatta University in Nairobi and two years of teaching Swahili language and literature at Egerton University, Kenya, I came to the US, where I got my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Penn State in African literatures with a minor in Women's Studies. Since I came to Smith in 2000, I've been teaching Comparative Literature courses on African Women's Drama, Twentieth-Century Literatures of Africa, Gender Issues in African Women's Narratives, The Feminist Novel in Africa, and Rewritings of The Tempest. I'm offering a new course this spring, The Making of the African Novel, in which we'll explore the reasons that the novel, a European genre, came into prominence in Africa as the European colonizers were beginning to leave the continent. I'm also affiliated with the Afro-American Studies Program here, and I plan new courses on Africa and the African diaspora, including Caribbean writers.

My main research interest is the work of contemporary African women playwrights such as Penina Mlama, Amandina Lihamba, Tess Osonye Onwueme and Ama Ata Aidoo. I've interviewed several dramatists who write in Swahili, such as Penina Muhando, and I've helped bring other playwrights to Smith: Julie Okoh from Nigeria, Amandina Lihamba from Tanzania. I'm finishing a book (Resisting Traditionalism, Resisting Tradition: Voices of Rebellion in African Women's Drama) about the themes and forms of this highly political drama, on which I've published several articles, including "Four Swahili Women Playwrights and a Critique of Development," in African Development into the Twenty-First Century (2001), and "Oral Performance and the Creative Imagination in Penina Muhando's Nguzo Mama," in a special issue of Folklore Forum: Folklore and Instruction in Africa (1997). My other published essays include "Negotiating Between Tomb and Womb: Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter" in Contemporary Literature in the African Diaspora. I'm interested, as well, in the dialectic between regional and European influences on African narratives, in postcolonial theory, and in African women's perspectives on feminist theory and action. I'm currently editing a special issue of Metamorphoses (journal of the Five-College seminar on literary translation) on Translation in African Languages.