Hello and welcome. My name is Ranka Primorac and I am an Associate Professor of African Literature at the Department of English, University of Southampton. I am a scholar of African literature with a special interest in Southern Africa. My published work revolves around issues related to the social functioning of literature, decolonial cosmopolitanisms, city texts and genres, and African canon formation.  

I earned my BA at the University of Zagreb, in the country of my birth (Croatia). My MA is from the University of Zimbabwe, awarded during an extended period of living and working in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. I came to the UK in the late 1990s, to work on the PhD I completed at Nottingham Trent University in 2003. Prior to becoming a full-time lecturer at Southampton, I spent several years temping at a string of British institutions of higher learning. This experience sparked my ongoing interest in equity, diversity and inclusion in higher education. I was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022. I enjoy convening modules on the novel form, decolonial reading and writing, African freedoms, and gender & sexuality in African fiction. 

My monograph in progress (provisionally titled Queues of Limitless Hope) works with recent theories of World Literature to think about the representations of modern African subjects in times of social crisis. I’m also developing a research project related to the counter-racialisation of politics and culture in the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War.