Yogita Goyal is professor of African American studies and English at UCLA and the author of two monographs: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from the MLA. Her visit is presented by the Postcolonial Collective as part of the 2026 UGA Humanities Festival.

Her work has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and the UC President’s Office, and she is the recipient of UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching. Past president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and U.S. literature and is working on “Aesthetics of Refuge,” a monograph on twenty-first century refugee literature and culture, and “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found,” a study of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival.

The Postcolonial Collective is a cross-departmental group of faculty and graduate students whose work intersects with the broad field of postcolonial studies. It holds regular meetings and invites local and national scholars to talk with UGA students and faculty.