Ainehi Edoro

Bio:

Ainehi Edoro-Glines is a Nigerian literary scholar who studies African literature and digital culture. She is a Mellon Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores how stories, in novels and on social media, offer new ways of thinking about the art, politics, and philosophy of world-making.

Her book, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), traces how African novelists draw on the figure of the forest from indigenous narratives to create fictional worlds that challenge systems of power like colonialism, respond to disruption with creativity, and imagine futures beyond inherited structures.

She also studies digital culture through a literary lens, examining how social media platforms serve as spaces for experimenting with modes of perception and world-building. She teaches a large lecture course called “Social Media Writing,” which reimagines social media as a space for creativity, archive-making, and rhetorical experimentation.

Edoro-Glines is the founder and editor of Brittle Paper, a leading online platform for African literary culture. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The Guardian, BBC World News, Africa is a Country, and Times Literary Supplement. She has given lectures at Yale University, Northwestern University, the University of Stuttgart, and other institutions.

Research:

African literature, spatial studies, novel studies, forests, digital culture, teaching social media, Instagram, 20th–21st Century Global literature.

Recent Publications:

• “Mediated Ancestrality: Mariama Bâ, Instagram, and the Poetics of Fragmentation.” PMLA 139:5 (October 2024): 915–920.
• “Unruly Archives: Literary Form and the Social Media Imaginary.” English Literary History 89:2 (Summer 2022): 523–546.
• “Achebe’s Evil Forest: Space, Violence, and Order in Things Fall Apart.” Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry 5:2 (2018): 176–192.
• Review of Second Class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta. Times Literary Supplement (July 8, 2022).
• “Using Dirt to Write History.” Journal of African History 63:1 (2022) [Review].
• “In Conversation with Ainehi Edoro.” In Imprint Africa: Conversations with African Women Publishers, ed. Joel Cabrita et al. (Huza Press, 2025).

Forthcoming Work:

• “Digital Africas.” In Intellectual Traditions of African Literature 1960–2015, eds. Jean-Marie Jackson and Cajetan Iheka (Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Awards and Honors:

• IRH Fellowship
• Vilas Early Career Award
• Mellon-Morgridge Professorship
• First Book Program
• New African Magazine 100 Most Influential Africans
• Okay Africa 100 Women List