Personal Statement
I am currently a British Academy International Fellow in the University of Liverpool's department of Languages, Cultures and Film. After completing my first degree in English (ISP/Bukavu-DR Congo) in 2006, I worked as both secondary school EFL teacher and university teaching assistant for 3 years. I then moved into SGBV projects as Transition Officer, and into Banro Congo Mining company as Administration Associate to provide language training and Public Relations support on mining exploration sites. In 2013, I came to the UK to start my MA in Literary Stylistics (University of Birmingham-UK), funded by both the University of Birmingham's International Scholarship and an All Saints Trust Overseas' scholarship. I returned back to the DR Congo in 2015 and took up university teaching (Universite Officielle de Bukavu) in Literary Theory and Criticism, Modernist Literature, and Narrative Analysis in Fiction and Film, besides consultancy with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Gender Research and Training. In 2018 I moved to Sydney/Australia to start a PhD in English Literary Studies, funded by UNSW-Sydney's flagship funding scheme, Scientia PhD scholarship. During my PhD candidature, I was nominated by UNSW-Sydney's School of the Arts and Media to attend the 2019 Harvard Institute for World Literature session, during which I took advanced graduate seminars in Science-Fiction and the Imagination of Planetary Futures, and Environmental Humanities and New Materialisms. On the same occasion, I assisted Harvard University's Professor David Damrosch in the translation of Giambatista Viko; or, The Rape of African Discourse (https://www.mla.org/Publications/Bookstore/MLA-Texts-and-Translations/Giambatista-Viko-or-The-Rape-of-African-Discourse). Upon completing my PhD, I took up university teaching in Australia, on a range of courses including Academic Writing for Undergraduate Arts Students (University of Sydney); Colonialism, Resistance, Justice and Transition; Media, Culture and Everyday Life; Understanding Digital Cultures, Media, Climate Crisis, and Extinction; Race, Media, and Politics; Transnational Media (UNSW-Sydney); Communicating Difference; and Comparing Indigenous Histories and Politics (UTS).

My Office Hours are Wednesdays and Thursdays 10-12pm. Otherwise, I can also do Teams, but kindly email me for an arrangement of the day and time slot which suit both you and me.

Room 256, 1-7 Abercromby Square

Research Overview
My primary and broad research interests span Literary and Cultural Theory and Criticism, Aesthetics and Politics, and Literature and Philosophy. I completed my MA with a dissertation on "Relevance Theory and The Rhetoric of Narrative Suspense" under the supervision of Professor Michael Toolan, and my PhD with a thesis on the "Pollinating Mesh: The Ecological Thought in Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction" with a comparison to some African fictions, under the supervision of Professors Brigitta Olubas, Elizabeth McMahon and Bill Ashcroft. My thesis aimed to establish how the mesh or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, humans and nonhumans, pollinates this literature and how the aesthetics of these texts warrants their reading as sites of these enmeshments. It thus engaged Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, ontologies, or metaphysics to establish how these underpin Indigenous literature and frame its reading. To attend to the global pertinence of both the texts under study and the ecological thought as the main conceptual framework, the thesis engaged Object Oriented Ontology and adjacent theories of the ontological turn alongside transnational Indigenous critical thought.

Shaped by this doctoral research, my current research is on multilingual Environmental and Energy Humanities in the context of Comparative Black and Indigenous Race, Cultures, Literatures and Arts, with specific focus on their epistemologies, (eco)aesthetics and poetics, as well as their relevance for contemporary global challenges-oriented policies. My work uses an intersubjective ethnographical approach for a (renovated) critical reading of Indigenous literature, grounded within Indigenous cultures and values, and developed through meaningful interpersonal relations. I bring African Indigenous theories of knowledge into conversation with both other world Indigenous forms of knowledge creation and the post-Enlightenment forms of critical thinking that underpin much contemporary environmental discourse and policy development.

My postdoctoral research has been funded by the British Academy. I have been working as a co-investigator on a collaborative British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented Research Grant on Power and Voice in Climate Change, titled "Re-valuing Local Knowledges: Understanding Voice, Land and Power for Climate Action in Eastern DRC, jointly with Sarah Arens (University of Liverpool), Nicola Thomas (University of Lancaster), Blake Ewing (University of Nottingham) and Emery Mudinga (ISDR/Bukavu). As for my current project, it is funded as a British Academy International fellowship and titled "Climate, Culture and Meaning: Rethinking Time, Place and Knowledge in Congo Rainforest Fiction" Las but not least, I am also a recipient of the 2025 Balzan Colloquium Award, fully funded by Harvard University’s Institute for World Literature, for presenting my work at the institute’s colloquium on Literary Responses to Ecological Crisis.