Ph.D., Columbia University, 2022

A.B., Princeton University

Akua Banful is a multidisciplinary comparatist whose research and writing centers on questions of climate, culture, and empire. Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial literary studies, African and black diasporic literatures and cultural production, translation, climate arts, marine mammals, and political theory and philosophy.

Her current book project considers how figurations of the climate in works set across the tropics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries negotiated the ideological paradoxes that surrounded the end of empire, the political and aesthetic project of decolonization, and postcolonial reckonings with Atlantic World Slavery.

Prior to her appointment at UC Davis, she was the Mellon Pre-Doctoral Fellow in Climate and Inequality at the Climate Museum from 2020-22. Her public writing can be found in fora, such as the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.