Overview
Bwesigye Bwa Mwesigire is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. His research and teaching interests range from African (Indigenous) studies, through Black (Diaspora) studies, Cultural studies, literary activism, political economy, to law and literature. His work cuts across various literary forms, from fiction, through drama, memoir, poetry, and other media like film and popular culture generally. His dissertation, tentatively titled: “The Transcontinental Poetics of Ugandan Women’s Fiction” focuses on the ways Ugandan women-authored short stories and novels published in the post-2000 period contribute to a Black Radical Tradition, through a practice of Afro-feminism, African colonial and indigenous nationalisms.
Bwesigye’s scholarship appears in Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies, Journal of the African Literature Association, Research in African Literatures, The Journal of Leadership and Developing Societies, and the AFLA Quarterly while his commentary has appeared among others at Africa is a Country, Quartz, This is Africa, African Arguments, Africa in Words, Music & Literature, The Guardian, Aster(ix), Mail and Guardian, Johannesburg Review of Books and Chimurenga Chronic, and his fiction and poetry has been published by New Orleans Review, African Roar, Saraba, Kalahari Review, and the New Black Magazine among others.
Bwesigye co-founded the Center for African Cultural Excellence in 2012, a non-profit that popularizes progressive ideas and practice through the Ubuntu Reading Group, supports soccer talent development among rural youth through the Nyanja F.C., brings together founders of Africa-centred literary and cultural initiatives under the Arts Managers and Literary Activists (AMLA) Network, and supports emerging writers through the Writivism Literary Initiative. His work has been awarded a Cornell University Library Summer Digital Humanities Fellowship (2018), the African Leadership Centre Fellowship for African Scholars (2015 - 2017), the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Young African Scholars Award (2015), and the Do School Theatre Fellowship (2013), among others.
Research Focus
- Cultural Studies
- Literary Activism
- Political Economy
- Law and Literature
- Black (Diaspora) Studies
- African (Indigenous) Studies
- 20th & 21st Century Literatures