Nasrin Olla

Nasrin Olla is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African American Studies at the University of Virginia, with a visiting scholar affiliation at Brown University. She earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in Literatures in English from Cornell University.

Her research and teaching interests include:

• African Diasporic and African Literature
• Anglophone and Francophone African Thought
• Critical Theory and Continental Philosophy
• Gender Studies and Queer Theory

She is completing her first book, The Right to Opacity, which examines alterity and ethics in African and diasporic literature. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Mays Fellowship, A.W. Mellon Fellowship, and Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She received Cornell’s Guilford Prize (2020) for best dissertation and was named among Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans (2021). Her publications appear in b2o, History of the Present, and LA Review of Books.