Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu
Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature
Academic background
Tinashe Mushakavanhu obtained a first class BA degree in English from Midlands State University (Zimbabwe) before embarking on an MA in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Carmarthen (Wales) and later on received a PhD in English from University of Kent (England). He has held fellowships at University of Edinburgh (Scotland); Rhodes University and University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) as well as City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism (USA).
Research interests
The central theme of Tinashe’s research is the role of literary culture in documentation, historical knowledge, and political power. He has particular interests in the aesthetics and materiality of writing; archives, and archival theory; translation; African and diaspora literatures, digital humanities, romanticism, creative writing, media studies, and comparative literatures. The work manifests in interdisciplinary modalities. It blurs creative and critical methods, and writing genres, in order to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical.
Exhibitions
The Rose that Grew from Concrete, Museum of African Design, August 2019
Beautiful Words Are Subversive, Arts Research Institute, Virginia Commonwealth University, March – June 2019; Brooklyn Public Library, October 2019 – January 2020
Recent Publications
Books
A Brief History of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair (Cambridge University Press, 2022 forthcoming)
Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on a Speculative Archive (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020)
Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (Black Chalk & Co. 2019)
Chapters
‘Minding Gaps: Navigating Gaps in the Zimbabwean Imaginaries’ with Nontsikelelo Mutiti, in Ways of Knowing Cities, ed. Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019)