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 book Africa in Stereo traces Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African responses to African American music in print and film and is under contract with Oxford University Press. Her publications include:

“Sound Effects: Synaesthesia as Purposeful Distortion in Keorapetse Kgositsile’s Poetry,” Comparative Literature Studies 46:1 (Spring ): 287-310, 2009. 

“The Name of the Father, The Name of the Son, and the Name of the Homeric Spirit in Walcott’s Omeros,” La Torre- Revista General de la Universidad de Puerto Rico.Tercera época, !0:.36-37: 175-188, 2005.

“Prying Death’s Door Open: Mourning the Living-Dead in Maryse Condé’s Moi, Tituba sorcière…Noire de Salem." in Come Weep With Me:loss and mourning in the writings of Caribbean women writers.  Ed. Joyce Harte, 56-73. Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007.

“Listening in on Jazz.” The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Teaching and Writing on Race, Identity, and Culture. Ed. Jami L. Carlacio. 137-144. NCTE Press, 2007. 

Her poetry appears in Bitter Oleander, Runes Review, InTensions and the Center for Book Arts Broadside Poetry Series.

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 Penn Humanities Forum Junior Faculty Fellow. 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.