Career Details

Kwasu earned his undergraduate degree in Honours English Literature at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, with a concentration in Critical and Literary Theory. He subsequently undertook an MScR in Critical Theory at the University of Edinburgh, and completed his PhD at the same institution. His dissertation focussed on theorizing and historicizing the issues of debates surrounding the role of Power, Identity, and Otherness in DC Comics' flagship character Superman. He taught courses in composition, literary and critical theory, and Africana literature and film at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana - where he also served as Director of its Writing Centre - before joining the ELCW Department in 2023.He has published on a wide range of topics, texts, and media in a variety of international journals and anthologies, as well as his recent single-authored monograph concerning the life and career of the Russian-American polymath Genndy Tartakovsky (Genndy Tartakovsky: Sincerity in Animation, Bloomsbury, 2022). He is currently writing a second monograph for Lexington Books due for publication in 2024. Titled Trauma and Time Travel in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema: The Time Machine and the Hammer (Lexington Books, 2024), the text analyses what he calls the 'inter-tension' between trauma and time using examples from 20th and 21st century time travel science fiction cinema as dialogic case studies.In terms of supervision, he would welcome applications for research projects on twentieth-century fiction and film in general, but in particular science fiction, horror, adaptations (notably, comic book films), gender (especially psycho-sexuality) in film, comic books, and critical/creative projects that explore, interrogate, re-interpret, and reapply Continental critical theoretical traditions.

Current Teaching

Kwasu currently teaches seminars in the following modules: ENGL101: World Literature; ENGL201: The Theory and Practice of Criticism and ENGL208: Literature and Film.

Current Research

Kwasu researches and publishes in several fields, including contemporary cinema, science fiction, comic books and their adaptations. Recent and current work includes chapters in anthologies, papers, and published articles on the fiction of Stanislaw Lem, the psycho-emotional aspects of the cinema of David Lynch and David Robert Mitchell; mind-engineering in and through social media in relation to psycho-economics as outlined by Edward Bernays; and the ecocritcal dimensions of George Miller's Maxverse.

Web Links

Kwasu's co-founded press project can be found here: Phasmid Press: https://phasmidpress.org/the-empty-set;

Phasmid Press (X): https://twitter.com/phasmid_press?lang=en; Phasmid Press (instagram): https://www.instagram.com/phasmid_press/?hl=enHis personal Substack túqióngbǐshǒuxiàn (T. Q. B. X; trans. Literally: "When the map is unrolled, the dagger is revealed")

T. Q. B. X (Substack): https://mapscrollanddagger.substack.com/

PhD Supervision Interests

Kwasu is open to supervising candidates with a range of interests. Please see his above research overview to get a sense of what these might be.