Christian Uwe

Christian Uwe headshot
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
College of Liberal Arts
Twin Cities

Award Year
2023
University Award
McKnight Presidential Fellow Award

Reading and shaping our political lives with literature

Christian Uwe’s scholarship joins together literature, semiotics, and philosophy to investigate contemporary forms of cultural and political existence. Drawing particularly on sub-Saharan, Caribbean, and French literatures, his research proposes a comparative examination of crises such as contemporary afterlives of the colonial project, environmental degradation, migration, and attendant geopolitical conflicts. His work, which has been described as “exquisitely intellectual” and “truly impressive”, includes two books, Le Discours choral (2017), on the influential works of Martinican intellectual Édouard Glissant, and L’Archive paradoxale (2022), on contemporary sub-Saharan novels. He is currently working on a book-length critique of the politics of Difference from the perspective of African and Caribbean thinkers.