Tsitsi Jaji earned her Ph.D. (2009) in comparative literature from Cornell University with concentrations in African, Caribbean and African-American literature in English, French and Spanish. Her dissertation was entitled Africa in Stereo: Comparative Black Acoustic Imaginaries In Poetry And Film From Ghana, Senegal And South Africa, and she is currently building on this material towards her first book. She has published articles and/or book chapters on Nafissatou Diallo, Édouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, and most recently Keorapetse (Willie) Kgositsile (Comparative Literature Studies 46:2), as well as a handful of poems in obscure but treasured small press journals.

Originally from Zimbabwe, Dr. Jaji has conducted fieldwork throughout Southern and West Africa, with generous support from the TIAA-CREF Ruth Sims Hamilton Fellowship, and has been a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a Society for the Humanities (Cornell) Mellon Graduate Fellow, and a member of the Telluride Association. She considers teaching and mentoring important ways to return the tremendous support she has received along the way.

Her primary research interests continue to be transnational black cultural relations and exchanges, the relationship between music and literature, theorizations of listening, and Africana expressions of feminism. On occasion she revisits a former self as an Oberlin-trained pianist, however her primary commitment is to literary studies, which she believes can be transformative by training the imagination and powers of observation and empathy.