Stanford University
300 Pasteur Drive, Stanford, CA 94304
USA
Presenter: Alvan A. Ikoku, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Medicine (General Medical Disciplines) and Comparative Literature
Stanford University
Alvan Ikoku is an assistant professor of comparative literature and of medicine at Stanford University. He is also affiliated with Stanford’s centers for african studies and comparative studies in race and ethnicity, as well as the centers for biomedical ethics and global health. Prior to joining the faculty in 2014, he was an Andrew W Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the humanities center.
Prof Ikoku earned his MD at Harvard Medical School and his PhD in English and Comparative literature at Columbia University. He has since worked at the intersection of literature and medicine, specializing in the study of African and African diasporic literatures, twentieth-century fiction, narrative ethics, and histories of tropical medicine and global health.
He is primarily concerned with literary, medical, and public health discourses on Africa and its diasporas. His research situates these discourses within post-nineteenth-century movements in world literature and world health. And currently, as part of a book project, he studies the place of the novel in the emergence of global health as a modern medical specialty.
Prof Ikoku has written for the World Health Organization, Small Axe, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, and Virtual Mentor, the ethics journal of the American Medical Association. He has also received president’s teaching awards at Columbia and Harvard Universities. And his research has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship, and the Rhodes Trust.
See also alvanikoku.com.