Dr Selwyn Cudjoe has been named the Margaret E Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T Carlson professor in Comparative Literature at Wellesley College in the United States. Cudjoe is the professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department at Wellesley. Andrew Shennan, Provost and Dean of the college said: "In pioneering the study of Caribbean writers, as well as African-American and women writers, Selwyn has changed the way we think about these important, and previously undervalued, facets of the multi-cultural body of literature in English."
After teaching at several universities including Harvard and Cornell, Cudjoe joined Wellesley in the fall of 1986. He was elevated to a full professorship in 1990 and from 1995 to 1999, served as the fourth Marion Butler McLean Professor of the History of Ideas. Born in Tacarigua, Cudjoe holds a first degree in English, a master's degree in American Literature from Fordham University and a PhD in American Literature from Cornell University.
In April 1988, Cudjoe co-ordinated the first major conference on women writers of the English-speaking Caribbean. An associate of the Department of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, he received his second National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1994 to organise a summer seminar on Caribbean Literature for secondary school teachers. The six-week seminar attracted teachers from Africa, the Caribbean and across the United States. Cudjoe is the author of several publications�Caribbean Visionary: ARF Weber and the Making of the Guyanese Nation (2009) being the most recent.