Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Dr. Tinashe Mushakavanhu is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Previously, he was a Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent and an MA in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Carmarthen.

At the heart of Mushakavanhu’s research is a commitment to rethinking African literature through the archive, not only as a repository of memory, but as a method of critique and creativity. He engages with the dispersed, often overlooked materials of African writers to chart new narratives about literature’s role in shaping political and cultural imaginaries. His work moves across genres and media - books, exhibitions, film - foregrounding questions of craft, process, and method. Whether exploring Pan-African literary networks, the aesthetics of stone sculpture, or the infrastructures that support African knowledge production, Mushakavanhu’s research reveals literature as both an intellectual practice and a public, political act.

His acclaimed book Some Writers Can Give You Two Heartbeats (2019) exemplifies this method. Conceived as a triptych - a publication, a film, and a travelling exhibition, the book embodies an immersive, experimental approach that brings archival research into conversation with creative practice. Mushakavanhu’s current and forthcoming projects continue to explore this terrain, seeking to expand the possibilities of how African literary and cultural histories are told, experienced, and understood.

Beyond academia, Mushakavanhu’s work is shaped by a longstanding engagement with publishing and journalism. These experiences inform his interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching, grounded in a commitment to interrogating the politics of knowledge production and its implications for Africa and its global diasporas. His work often takes the form of ambitious, intercontinental collaborations that build networks and infrastructures of thought.

He is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including a term as Paris Writer-in-Residence, as well as residencies at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS), the University of Johannesburg, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. He has twice served as a judge for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.