Overview
Nasrin Olla is a South African scholar who specializes in African and African diasporic literature, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in English literature and languages at Cornell University. She is currently working on her first book project, Reaching for Opacity, which engages anew with the theme of alterity across a range of contemporary African and African diasporic literature. In 2020, Reaching for Opacity was awarded Cornell University’s Guilford Prize for “the dissertation judged to display the highest excellence in English prose.” Nasrin’s research has been supported by the Mellon Mays Fellowship, the A.W. Mellon Fellowship at the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, and the Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Nasrin’s writing has appeared in international publications such as the History of the Present, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and boundary2. In 2021, Nasrin was named one of the Top 200 most influential Young South Africans by the Mail & Guardian.
Research Focus
- African Diasporic & African Literature
- Anglophone and Francophone African Thought
- Ethics/Critical Theory
- Gender Studies/Queer Theory