Dr. Deborah Nyangulu

• Literary and Cultural Studies
• Contemporary African Literature & African Studies
• Masculinities and Power
• Social Media and Social Movements
• Black freedom struggles
• Critical Theory
• Theories and history of nation, nationalism, & transnationalism

Academic Qualifications

• 2019
  Doctor of Philosophy (English Philology) – Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster
  Dissertation Title Big Man Aesthetics: Masculiity, Power, and Contemporary African Literature
• 2013
  M.A. National and Transnational Studies: Literature, Language, Culture – Westfälische Wilhelms-University Münster
• 2005
  B.A. Humanities (English and Classics) – University of Malawi, Chancellor College

Professional Experience

• 2022
  Guest Editor of Research in African Literatures’ special Edition Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Disruption.
• since 2022
  Postdoctoral Researcher (RTG Contradiction Studies at University of Bremen.
• 2020 – 2022
  Postdoctoral Researcher (English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at University of Münster).
• 2019 – 2020
  Lecturer and Researcher (English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at University of Münster).
• 2015 – 2019
  Lecturer and PhD Candidate (English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at University of Münster).
• 2008 – 2010
  Senior Reporter and Columnist (Blantyre Newspapers Ltd, Times Group).
• 2005 – 2008
  Reporter (Blantyre Newspapers Ltd, Times Group).

• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2025. Maps and Dissecting Empire. A Visit to the Osher Map Library. YouTube (08.09.2025).
• Nyangulu, Deborah & Souleymane Bachir Diagne. 2024. Philosophy in a World of Multi-Crisis: Deborah Nyangulu in Conversation with Souleymane Bachir Diagne. YouTube (27.09.2024).
• Stanusch, Natalia, Richard Rogers, Noemi Capparelli, Luca Bottani, Emma Garzoino, Marius Liedtke, Deborah Nyangulu, Omer Rothenstein, Chufan Huang, Michelle Stewart, Shuyu Zhang & Quyang (July) Zhao. 2024. What Do Deepfakes Want? Using ‘Digital Forensic Gaze’ and Digital Methods to See (like) Deepfakes. Digital Methods Initiative.
• Willaert, Tom, Eckehard Olbrich, Carlo Santagiustina, Nora Zech, Jan Babnik, Lingyu Li, Shuyu Zhang, Marina Loureiro, Brogan Latil, Michelle Stewart, Brittany Elizabeth Zelada, Tahereh Aboofazeli, Deborah Nyangulu, Andrea Elena Febres Medina, Elif Bozkurt & Sara Nuta. 2024. Affordances for Expressing Collective Identities – The Case of the 2024 French Parliamentary Elections. Digital Methods Initiative.
• Nyangulu, Deborah & Albert Sharra. 2023. Agency and Incentives of Diasporic Political Influencers on Facebook Malawi. Social Media + Society 9(2). DOI
• Folie, Sandra & Gianna Zocco. 2023. Sketches of Black Europe. A Series of Interviews. CompLit 2(6). 187–191. [Interview mit Deborah Nyangulu] https://doi.org/10.48611/isbn.978-2-406-16076-2.p.0169
• Nyangulu, Deborah (ed.). 2022. Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Disruption (Special Issue). Research in African Literatures 53(3). LINK
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2022. Introduction. Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Disruption (Special Issue). Research in African Literatures 53(3). 1–22. DOI
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2022. State of the Planet: Homi Bhabha and Namwali Serpell in Conversation. Research in African Literatures 53(3). 161–167. DOI
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2020. What’s in a Name? Renewing Socialism Via Decolonization. In Knopf, Kerstin and Quintern, Detlev (eds.), From Marx to Global Marxism: Eurocentrism, Resistance, Postcolonial Criticism. 219–232.
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2020. Espinoza Garrido, Felipe, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu & Mark U. Stein (eds.). Locating African European Studies: Interventions, Intersections, Conversations. DOI
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2020. African European Studies as a Critique of Contingent Belonging. In Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu & Mark U. Stein (eds.), Locating African European Studies: Interventions, Intersections, Conversations, Routledge. 1-28. LINK
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2019. Foreword: More Than Patriarchy. In Elizabeth Rogers (ed.), Anthology 2019: Stories of the Struggle for Education and Equality in Malawi, 16-18. Voice Flame.
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2018. Big Men and Performances of Sovereignty in Contemporary African Novels. Research in African Literatures, 49(3). 101–115. LINK
• Nyangulu, Deborah. 2018.Nationalism and the Postcolonial. ACOLIT 75. 25–26. PDF

Invited Talks

• 24.06.2023
  Roundtable Responsibility in Gender and Queer Studies at the Summer School Dialogues for Responsible Gender and Queer Studies: Experiences from the South of Africa and Germany, University of Oldenburg [Invited by Dr. Sylvia Pritsch]
• 15.11.2022
  Guest Lecture Serpell’s The Old Drift: Disruption at the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL), Amsterdam [Invited by Prof. Dr. Margriet van der Waal and Dr. Astrid Weyenberg].
• 07.07.2022
  Online Lecture #GandhiMustFall Movement and Reclaiming Urban Space in Malawi. Forms and Spaces of Contemporary African Protests at the Online Lecture Series Forms and Spaces of contemporary African Protests, University of Konstanz [Invited by Drs. Billy Kalima and Jeannine-Madeleine Fischer]
• 23.05.2022
  Lecture Series Engaged Pedagogy and Digital Activism. Activism and Academia Lecture Series Graduate School Practices of Literature, University of Münster [Invited by Dr. Anna Thiemann]
• 11. – 13.03.2021
  Workshop Rethinking Knowledge in Transnational Terms. Theorizing African Diaspora(s) at the Anew Workshop. Bielefeld Zif Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Bielefeld [Invited by Prof. Dr. Gigi Adair]
• 08.07.2020
  Online Public Lecture Hashtag Movements and Decolonial Pedagogy.
  Invited by Prof. Dr. Annika Mcpherson, Universität Augsburg on 08.07.2020.
  Invited by Dr. Chandra Kanta Panda, Barabazar Bikram Tudu Memorial College on 24.06.2020.
  Invited by Arbeitskreis Kolonialismus, WWU Münster on 10.06.2020.
• 13.11.2018
  Critical Reading and Public Discussion Versklavung für Baumwolle with Sukla Chatterjee, Kerstin Knopf und Detlev Quintern at “Eine Uni- Ein Buch – Eine Stadt: Global Cotton”, University of Bremen [Invited by Prof. Dr. Kerstin Knopf]
• 21.06.2018
  Lecture Postcolonial Resurrections: Emerging Debates in the 21st Century Present at Decolonize: Lange Nacht der Postkolonialen Perspektiven, Institut für Politikwissenschaft WWU Münster [Invitation from student initiative Institut für Politikwissenschaft WWU Münster]
• 23.02.2018
  Lecture Contemporary African Literary Studies Today at the Lecture Series African Scholars, Humboldt Haus WWU Münster [Invited by the Humboldt Haus WWU, Münster].

Conference Papers

• 23. – 25.02.2024
  Conference Black Atlantic Affordances. Contested Memory Cultures at University of Texas at Austin
• 14. – 16.03.2023
  Talk Media Ecologies: Pitfalls of Activism on Social Media Platforms. At the workshop Bridging Black Freedom Struggles Network Workshop, AmerikaHaus Munich
• 08. – 10.09.2022
  Talk Skeleton Subjectivity: Reading Derek Landy with Amos Tutuola at the International Workshop on Contemporary Irish Literature, University of Leipzig
• 09. – 10.04.2022
  Talk Towards a Pluriversal African Literary System at the Disobedient Forms Symposium, Stellenbosch South Africa
• 23. – 25.03.2022
  Talk From a Colonial Memoir to Avengers: Infinity War: Historical Continuities of Racial Anxieties and Ecological Apocalypse at Sketches of Black Europe: Imagining Europe/ans in African and African Diasporic Narratives, ZfLBerlin
• 05. – 06.02.2019
  Talk The Self-help Genre and Public Intellectuals in the Digital Age at Postcolonial Intellectuals and Their European Publics, Utrecht University
• 11. – 13.09.2018
  Talk Performing Bigmanity: Masculinities in Meja Mwangi’s Rafiki Man Guitar’ at the ASA UK 2018 Conference, University of Birmingham
• 09. – 12.05.2018.
  Talk Bigmanism and the Aesthetics of Power at the GAPS International Conference: Nationalism and the Postcolonial, Johannes Gutenberg Mainz
• 04. – 05.05.2018
  Talk Marxism and Utopian Visions in Contemporary African Literature at the lecture series Karl Marx, Marxism and the Global South, University of Bremen
• 14. – 17.06.2017
  Talk Necropolitan Spaces in Meja Mwangi’s The Big Chiefs at the African Literature Association Conference, Yale University, New Haven, USA
• 08. – 10.07.2016
  Talk Mapping a Big Man Aesthetics in Contemporary African Literature at the European Conference on African Studies (ECAS-6), Sorbonne, Paris
• 06. – 09.04.2016
  Talk Hero(ines)/Villains in Time of War: Affirming and Subverting Big Man Power in Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog at the African Literature Association (ALA) 2016, Emory University and Kennesaw State University, Atlanta, USA
• 14. – 16.05.2015
  Talk The Postcolonial as False Totality at GAPS: Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts, University of Muenster
• 11. – 14.06.2014
  Talk “What is Africa?” at the Young Scholars’ Meeting FUTURE AFRICA – Conference of the African Studies Association in Germany (VAD), University of Bayreuth
• 16.05.2014
  Talk Estranging a Strange Tyranny: Legson Kayira’s The Detaine at the Strangely Familiar Graduate Conference, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

• Winter Term 2015/16
  Übung Academic Skills
  Übung Communicating Texts and Theories
• Summer Term 2016
  Bachelor seminar Introduction to Contemporary Anglophone African Literature
  Graduate seminar Narratives of Migration
• Winter Term 2016/17
  Bachelor seminar Character and the Grotesque in post-Independence African Novels
  Bachelor seminar Criticism, Theory and Practice
• Summer Term 2017
  Übung Communicating Texts and Theories
  Postgraduate Class Literary Studies
• Winter Term 2017/18
  Übung Academic Skills
  Graduate seminar Literary and Cultural Studies
• Summer Term 2018
  Übung Communicating Texts and Theories
  Graduate lecture series  Hotspots in Literary/Cultural Studies and Linguistics
  Graduate seminar Social Protests, Social Media, and Hashtag Movements
• Winter Term 2018/19
  Bachelor seminar Understanding Critical Theory and Practice
  Graduate seminar Literary and Cultural Studies
  Postgraduate class Literary Studies
• Summer Term 2019
  Übung Theory and Literature
  Übung Advanced Language Course
• Winter Term 2019/20
  Graduate seminar Hashtag Activism and Shifting Public Spheres
  Postgraduate class Literary Studies
  Graduate seminar Nation, Nationalism, Transnationalism: Historical and Theoretical Foundations
• Summer Term 2020
  Bachelor’s introduction class Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies
• Winter Term 2020/21
  Graduate seminar Nation, Nationalism, Transnationalism: Historical and Theoretical Foundations
• Summer Term 2021
  Übung Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Theory and Literature
  Postgraduate class Literary Studies
• Winter Term 2021/22
  Graduate seminar Nation, Nationalism, Transnationalism: Historical and Theoretical Foundations
• Summer Term 2022
  Postgraduate class Literary Studies