Gĩchingiri Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ, associate professor of English and Africana Studies, is a specialist in African and African diasporic literatures and performance. His edited collection, Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature, was published in 2014 by the University of Tennessee Press as part of its Tennessee Studies in Literature series. Featuring twelve essays by scholars of African literature, Unmasking the African Dictator explores the dictator figure in fiction, drama, film, and music as a vehicle for depicting and critiquing the authoritarian state in Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, the Congo, Nigeria, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Kenya, and Uganda. The collection features a foreword by renowned Kenyan novelist, poet, and critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and an essay by Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ on Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah.
Ndĩgĩrĩgĩ is also the author of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Drama and the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Popular Theater Experiment (2007). His article “Kamĩrĩĩthũ in Retrospect” appeared in the November 2014 issue of African Theatre Journal.