Project Team

Jarad Zimbler is LITAID’s Principal Investigator. A Reader in English and Global Cultures at King’s, he has a BA in English Language and Literature from Oxford, and an MPhil and PhD in English Studies from Cambridge. He is author of J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Coetzee and The Cambridge Companion to World Literature (with Ben Etherington). Before coming to King’s he spent a decade at the University of Birmingham. He has also been a Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellow/ Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Visiting Scholar at the University of California Berkeley, and has previously been a recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and a British Academy Small Research Grant.

Michelle Kelly leads the Print Cultures strand of the LITAID project. She joined King’s in March 2024 as a Research Associate after nearly a decade as a Departmental Lecturer in World Literature at Oxford. She has a BA in English and Italian from the University of Galway, and an MA and PhD in English from York. She has been the recipient of an NUI Travelling Studentship, a BA Small Grant (Institutions of Freedom) and was co-investigator on a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship (Coetzee’s Other Arts). Her research focuses on African literature and print culture, sociological and material approaches to literature, prison writing, literature and other art forms, and the work of J. M. Coetzee. 

Henry Brefo

Henry Brefo joined King’s in January 2025 as Research Associate West African Arts Education. He holds a PhD in African Studies and Anthropology from the University of Birmingham and an MA in African Studies (with a focus on Politics and African Literature) from SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on chiefs and development, education bureaucracy, and arts and cultural production in Ghana, particularly, and Africa more broadly. His role in LITAID is to explore the history of arts education during the period of formal decolonisation in Ghana.

Selasi Adjor

Selasi Komla Adjor joined the LITAID research team in June 2025 to pursue a PhD on Ghanaian literary production and print culture. His research explores the multilingual Ghanaian literary field from the 1940s to the 1960s, with a focus on indigenous aesthetics and rhetorical traditions. He holds a Bachelor of Education from Valley View University, Ghana, where he was the English Department’s best graduating student in 2019, and an MPhil in English from the University of Ghana, Legon, where he researched nonhuman agency in Anglophone West African poetry. A professionally trained teacher, Selasi has over a decade of experience teaching English and Literature across Ghana. He is also an emerging poet and playwright, with a debut poetry collection available on Amazon.

Hyei Jin Kim

Hyei Jin Kim was a Research Assistant in Literary Archives and Print Cultures from January 2024 to January 2025. She researches on literary travellers who visited Ghana in the 1950s and supports other research strands of LITAID. Her own project investigates the Traditional Market Agreement, a British publishing monopoly that carved up the world book markets between British and American publishers. She holds a doctorate from Oxford where she examined the partnership between PEN International and UNESCO.

Advisers

Professor Stefan Helgesson, Stockholm University

Professor Peter D. McDonald, University of Oxford

Professor Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University

Professor Stephanie Newell, Yale University

Mrs Judith Opoku-Boateng, University of Ghana, Legon

Professor James Procter, University of Newcastle

Professor Ato Quayson, Stanford University

Professor Kate Skinner, University of Bristol

Professor Helen Yitah, University of Ghana, Legon

collaborators

Nodegoat/ LAB1100

ALMEDA: African Literary Metadata