Our Faculty

Background

Cullen Goldblatt is Assistant Professor in Literatures of the Global South. He earned his PhD in Comparative Literature, concentrating on African and Diasporic texts in French, Wolof, and English. Broadly, his scholarship and teaching explore how literary texts from the formerly colonized world represent power relations, how those texts have been translated, circulated, and received, and with what consequences for our understanding of literature and of the present. Related teaching and research interests include canon formation, in particular relating to African literature; language politics and translation, particularly in contemporary African contexts; and queer relationships and subjectivities in African literature and film.

Cullen has written scholarly and creative works; he is also a translator. His first monograph, Beyond Collective Memory: Structural Complicity and Future Freedoms in Senegalese and South African Narratives (2020), was brought out by Routledge. He was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to translate one of the earliest works of African literature in French, Bakary Diallo’s Force-Bonté (1926), into English. He has published two book-length translations of Francophone African literature: Patrice Nganang’s elobi (2006) and Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Rising of the Ashes [La remontée des cendres] (2010).

Cullen has taught at universities in the US and South Africa. His courses at Binghamton, on topics such as African and queer literatures, invite students to think about texts in their historical contexts, and about our own habits of reading–about why we read what we do, and how we make meaning of what we read.

Education

• PhD, University of California, Berkeley
• MFA, Sarah Lawrence College
• BA, Smith College

Research Interests

• African literatures in French, Wolof, and English
• Canon formation
• Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
• Queer and Feminist Theory
• Translation