Cheikh Thiam is a Professor of English and Black Studies at Amherst College and the author and editor of several volumes on Negritude and African philosophy and literature including Return to the Kingdom of Childhood: Re-envisioning the philosophical relevance of Negritude, the first book-length study of Leopold Sedar Senghor’s theory of Negritude as philosophy. He is also the author of Epistemologies from the South: Negritude, Modernity, and the Idea of Africa, that was recently published by the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press. Cheikh Thiam’s scholarship focuses on the ways in which Africa-centered epistemologies engage with colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial intellectual traditions; question the language divide in Africana studies; interrogate anti-Black racism in literature, philosophy, and cultural studies; and shape conceptions of being and identity in Africa and the African diaspora. He is a former associate editor of Research in African Literature and editor of African Studies Review, the journal of the African Studies Association.