Esther joined King's in 2019 after five years at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada as Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature. Her SSHRC-funded PhD and MA in English at the University of Toronto followed from a year of African Studies at the University of Ghana and, earlier on, a Diploma in theatre studies performance at Red Deer College.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Ghanaian popular fiction
• African multi-media performance practices
• Afro-gothic narrative
• Comics and graphic novels
• Black British popular arts

My book project Writing Sensation: Ghanaian Market Fiction's Unruly Aesthetics takes the case of a popular chapbook industry from West Africa in the early 2000s to revaluate the purported 'excess' of postcolonial expressive forms. The book considers the market fiction's unruliness in terms of a distribution of the sensational and argues that the genre's liberal indulgence in sensation exhibits a dynamism and vitalism that may be identified as an assertion of life in the face of capitalistic wasting. The main areas of criticism and philosophy that inform my thinking are African popular arts, aesthetic theory, black feminist writing, anti-colonial thought, critical race theory, and Negritude studies. My broader research interests are reflected in my current PhD supervision: an analytic project on Afrofuturist and South Asian futurist writing; and three practice-based research projects: a novel that reveals the sustaining social network of Krio Sierra Leonian and other Black Victorians, a screenplay about the colonial and British experience of Australian First Nations, and a graphic novel on alcoholism and the Bronte family.

Teaching

At the undergrad level, I teach modules on Afrofuturism and Afro-Gothic literature and film, and on the MA, I teach Popular Africa in London and have The Global Graphic Novel in development.

Expertise and public engagement

• ‘An Interview with Anthony Joseph: Afrofuturism, Black Surrealism, Sonic Revolution', co-written with Samridhi Aggarwal, King's English, Department of English blog (28 March, 2024).
• ‘Mansfield Park: Reclaiming the Narrative Through a Black Gaze’, a conversation with author Anni Domingo and Dr Emrys Jones, with performance excerpt from Mansfield Park, Watermill Theatre cast (25 Oct, 2023).
• 'Conversation with Bobby Joseph and Michael Robinson' on their graphic novel Scotland Yardie, co-hosted with MA student Maggie Lambo (22 Feb, 2021).
• Lecture 'Afrofuturism / Africanfuturism' for Black History Month (October 2020).

Selected publications

• ‘Market Literature: From Onitsha Origins to Ghanaian Progeny’, The Literary History of Genres in Africa, ed. Moradewun Adejunmobi, African Literature in Transition series, eds. Ato Quayson, Stephanie Newell, and Neil ten Kortenaar, Cambridge University Press (forthcoming).
• ‘Radical Equality in Ghanaian Market Fiction for Children’. International Journal of Children’s Literature 15.2 (2022), 204-217.
• ‘Millennial Capitalism’s Vampires: The South African Graphic Novel Rebirth’ (co-authored with Kelsey Hughes), Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 12.2 (2019), 75-96.
• ‘A Permissive Frame for Unruliness: The Educational Structures of Ghanaian Market Fiction’, Journal of the African Literature Association 12.1 (2018), 129-152.
• ‘Sensationally Reading Ghana’s Joy-Ride Magazine’. Postcolonial Reading Publics. Spec. issue of The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4.1 (2017), 27-48.