Assistant Professor of African and Black Diasporic Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu, has signed a contract with Cambridge University Press for her first academic monograph. The book, provisionally titled African Poetry, Black Transnationalism, and the Making of Literary Worlds, will appear in the prestigious Cambridge Studies in World Literature series.
The work 'examines networks of post-1960s Black Diasporic poets to highlight poetry as a world making genre. She is also working on a project about the aesthetic and social possibilities created by Africans through their use of emergent technologies and new media.'
Dr Adwetewa-Badu, who earned her PhD from the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, specialises in contemporary poetry and poetics, comparative Black studies, postcolonial literary history, and digital humanities. She previously held positions at Cornell and is the founder and director of the Global Poetics Project, a digital lab dedicated to experimental archiving, network modelling, mapping, and the use of digital tools to study poetry and poetics across Africa and the diaspora.
Dr Adwetewa-Badu has already established a strong publication record in leading journals. Her peer-reviewed articles and chapters include: “The Role of Poetry: Genre, Data Visualisation, and a Reframing of African Literature through Transition Magazine, 1960s–70s” (Research in African Literatures, 2025), which uses digital humanities methods to re-examine the influential magazine’s role in shaping African literary discourse.
“Videopoetry, Digital Lyrics, and Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Mother Tongues” (Journal of the African Literature Association, 2025), an exploration of new media forms in contemporary African poetry.
“New Media Poetics during Long-Crises: Racial Capitalism, Computational Capital, and Digital Literary Production” (Amerikastudien / American Studies, 2023).
“Poetry from Afar: Distant Reading, Global Poetics, and the Digital Humanities” (Modernism/Modernity Print+, 2020).
She has also contributed a chapter to the Cambridge University Press volume African Literature in Transition (on the Black diaspora’s African imagination) and has additional forthcoming or published work in Comparative Literature Studies, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, The Black Scholar, Wallace Stevens Journal, and other venues.