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Photograph of Lindsey Green-Simms

Lindsey Green-Simms Professor and Department Chair, Literature Literature

Degrees
BA University of Michigan, PhD University of Minnesota

Bio
Lindsey Green-Simms’ teaching and research focuses on film and literature from the Global South, with a particular emphasis on African cultural production. Professor Green-Simms' most recent book, Queer African Cinemas (Duke University Press, 2022), discusses LGBT African art films and popular melodramas in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Green-Simms argues that these films not only record the fear, anxiety, and vulnerability many queer Africans experience; they highlight how queer African cinematic practices contribute to imagining new hopes and possibilities and highlight potentials for queer life-building and survival. Professor Green-Simms’ first book, Postcolonial Automobility: Cars Cultural in West Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), examines how the contradictions of globalization, modernity, and consumer culture are embedded in the commodity of the automobile. Postcolonial Automobility has been awarded the African Literature Association First Book Prize as well as the èßäÉçÇøapp Comparative Literature Association Helen Tartar Book Subvention Award. Queer African Cinemas was awarded a National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Grant and Open Book Award and was selected as the African Literature Association 2024 Book of the Year in Scholarship.

Professor Green-Simms completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, and has previously taught at Duke University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in Women’s Studies, as well as at the College of Charleston. She has published articles in Camera Obscura, Transition, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Journal of African Cinemas, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing and has book chapters in Viewing African Cinema in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio U. Press) and Indiscretions: At the Intersection of Queer and Postcolonial Theory (Rodopi Press).
For the Media
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Teaching

Summer 2024

  • HNRS-050 Honors Supplement: Literature & the Ethical Life

  • LIT-225 African Literature

  • LIT-262 Literature & the Ethical Life

Fall 2024

  • CORE-106 Complex Problems Seminar: Decolonizing Knowledge

  • HNRS-150 AU Honors Exper Learning

Spring 2025

  • HNRS-151 AU Honors Research Experience: Decolonizing the University