Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry
Associate Professor of English
Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of African American Studies
Associate Professor of African & African American Studies
Education
Ph.D., Cornell University (2009)
Jaji is an associate professor of English at Duke University with expertise in African and African American literary and cultural studies, with special interests in music, poetry, and black feminisms. She previously taught at University of Pennsylvania and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities/Schomburg Center, Mellon Foundation, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, and National Humanities Center.
Her book, Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity (Oxford), won the African Literature Association’s First Book Prize, as well as honorable mentions from the American Comparative Literature Association and Society for Ethnomusicology. The book traces how exchanges between African American, Ghanaian, Senegalese and South African artists shaped cultural and political liberation projects. She is now at work on two new projects: Cassava Westerns is a study of how global Black writers and artists reimagine the American frontier myth to serve new, local purposes. The second, Classic Black is a study of poetry set to music by black concert music composers. Jaji has received a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation to pursue musicology studies in support of this project.
Originally from Zimbabwe, Jaji is also a poet. Her most recent collection, Mother Tongues (2019) was awarded the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Prize. Both her first collection Beating the Graves (2017) and a chapbook, Carnaval (2014) were published through the African Poetry Book Fund with University of Nebraska Press. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day series, Black Renaissance Noire, Almost Island, Prairie Schooner, Bitter Oleander, etc. and she has read at the Poetry Foundation, Library of Congress, and United Nations, among others.
In The News
Bringing Black Poetry and Music Into Dialogue - 12/12/2022
10 Books About Music from Duke Authors - 6/15/2021
Celebrate National Poetry Month with Six Duke Faculty Poets - 4/8/2021
Poems for this moment - 4/16/2020
Selected Publications
Jaji, Tsitsi. “A Tribute in Verse (Benediction and Translation).” African Studies Review, November 28, 2025, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1017/asr.2025.10141.
Jaji, Tsitsi. “Trade of Tears: Removal's Resonance in the Black Atlantic.” In The Acoustics of the Social on Page and Screen, edited by Nathalie Aghoro. Bloomsbury, 2020.
Jaji, Tsitsi. “Our Readers Write: mediating Africa Poetry's Audiences.” Research in African Literatures, 2020.
Jaji, Tsitsi Ella. Mother Tongues Poems. Northwestern University Press, 2019.
Selected Grants
New Directions - Musicology 2021 - 2025
National Humanities Center Fellowship 2018 - 2018
Selected Courses
POLSCI 527S: Global Africa
MUSIC 690S-1: Composition Seminar: Selected Topics
LIT 102: Introduction to African American Studies
ICS 510S: Global Africa