Dr Jairus Omuteche

The Department of Culture is pleased to announce that Jairus Omuteche has been awarded a PhD. His thesis, Representations of Home in Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Toni Morrison: (Re) Vision of Identity and Belonging, was supervised by Drs Kath Kerr-Koch (Director of Studies) and Geoff Nash. Jairus began his doctoral studies - which were funded by a studentship from the Cultural and Regional Studies Beacon - in June 2010. His future research will focus on comparative and postcolonial literatures within the nexus of representations of globalization and diasporic identities and belonging. Dr Omuteche will be resuming his lectureship in the Department of Languages and Literature Studies at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology in Kenya.

Jairus Omuteche on Toni Morrison and Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Jairus Omuteche has published an essay in Africa and Her Writers (2013). This collection, edited by Charles Smith and Chin Ce, is the tenth anniversary edition of a series from the International Research Council on African Literature and Culture. Jairus's essay on Toni Morrison and Ngugi wa Thiong'o derives from his PhD research on representations of home in the work of these authors.

Cosmopolitanism and diaspora

Jairus Omuteche, whose PhD research on representations of home in the work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Toni Morrison is supervised by Drs Kath Kerr-Koch and Geoff Nash (English), has published a comparative analysis of representations of the experience of diasporic home, identity and belonging in the novels of Edwidge Danticat, Dionne Brand, and Chika Unigwe. The chapter, entitled 'Global Cosmopolitanism and Diasporic Singularities' appears in Diasporic Choices (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013), a volume developed from a conference held at Mansfield College Oxford in 2012.