Simon E. Gikandi says he became a professor of English because he loved books. As a child in Kenya, books were his passion; they allowed him to experience different places, people, and times. His reading ignited a second passion: the English language. “I became interested in the global dimensions of English, how the language has traveled and evolved,” he said. “I thought of English as much more than a language—for me it was an entire world.”

Gikandi’s work focuses on the Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain. It crosses geographic boundaries, time periods, and disciplines. “In order to understand what I am doing in language and literature,” he said, “I have to have conversations with people in history, anthropology, the arts—other disciplines where the relationships between colonizer and colonized are studied and thought about. For example, you can’t talk about modernism—in the arts or in literature—without talking about borrowing. My work is to keep reminding people that the borrowing goes both ways.”

After graduating from the University of Nairobi in 1979 with a first-class degree in literature, Gikandi attended the University of Edinburgh as a British Council Scholar and then Northwestern University in Chicago to earn his PhD in English. His teaching career took him across the North American continent from California State University, Bakersfield, to Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He was the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan before coming to Princeton in 2004, where he teaches in the Department of English and the Center for African American Studies.

The students who sign up for Gikandi’s courses tend to be interested in the relationships between literature, language, the arts, and global policy, he says. Many of the students in his Freshman Seminar, “Literature and Human Rights,” want to discuss international cultural issues and policy as well as literature. His course offers them an opportunity to approach global issues from a humanities perspective.

Gikandi is interested in how the English language has evolved in Britain as well as in the colonized countries. “These are not two separate stories,” he said. “They are conflated; you cannot understand one without the other.” Most people look at the influence of the colonizing language on the indigenous culture, but for Gikandi that is only half the story. His research has found the effects of colonialism to be “two-way traffic”—influence in Britain has been, in some respects, as significant and pervasive as in the colonized countries.

This is one of the subjects of Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Gikandi’s forthcoming book about the influence of slavery on European intellectuals, in which he theorizes that the emergence of “detached” high culture and art patronage in 18th-century England reflected a need to be disassociated from the slave-trade source of wealth.

Gikandi is already at work on his next book, Translating English. “I am interested in the translation of English into other languages,” Gikandi said, “the reverse of what people usually work on.” He explores not only how English texts were translated in other places, but also how those translations have in turn influenced the original language and the accepted understanding of the original text. “Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was translated and used in Bengal by Indian nationalists to oppose the British government’s ban on sati, the practice of widow-burning,” Gikandi said. In the nationalist translation, Juliet, by killing herself after Romeo’s death, had committed sati. “Today when we discuss the play we have this thick layer of the many historical uses of this text—we must read our own culture through the prism of other cultures.”