Biography
Dr. Thomas Jay Lynn is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Berks in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Division. His teaching and scholarly interests include African, world, and ancient literatures, as well as the music of the Beatles. Tom is Program Chair of the Associate Degree in Letters, Arts, and Sciences, whose students he advises, and he is a member of the Global Studies Bachelor's Degree faculty. In 2017 Tom's book, Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration: Envisioning Language, was published by Palgrave Macmillan, and his other writings on African literature have been published in numerous refereed journals and in several books. Tom was elected in 2020 to the Northeast Modern Language Association Board of Directors to serve a three-year appointment as the British and Global Anglophone Studies Director. Tom was awarded the Penn State University Comparative Literature Sydney Aboul-Hosn Award 2021 for making "a decisive contribution to [students'] study of literature in a global context. . . ."
Book:
Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration: Envisioning Language - Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319513300#aboutBook
Publications
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “Self-possession and the Crisis of Post-colony in Achebe’s A Man of the People.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Published online March 1, 2021. 21 pages. Print publication forthcoming. DOI: 10.1177/0021989421989086.
“‘Redemption Song’: Slavery’s Disruption in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” English Studies in Africa. (Routledge - Taylor and Francis Group) 59.2 (2016): 54-63.
“Postcolonial Encounters Re-envisioned: Kojo Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes as Trickster Narrative.” Tradition and Change in Contemporary West and East African Fiction. Matatu 45 (2014). New York: Rodopi, 153-66.
“An Adequate Revolution: Achebe Writing Africa Anew.” Things Fall Apart. Ed. M. Keith Booker. Critical Insights. Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2011. 53-68.
“Catastrophe, Aftermath, Amnesia: Chinua Achebe’s ‘Civil Peace.’ ” Peace Research: The Canadian Journal of Peace and Conflict Studies 42.1-2 (2010): 73-88.
“Language and the Power of Subordination: Nigerian Pidgin in Achebe’s Fiction.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 12.2 (2005): 52-64.
“Tricksters Don’t Walk the Dogma: Nkem Nwankwo’s Danda.” College Literature 32.3 (2005): 1-20.
“Politics, Plunder, and Postcolonial Tricksters: Ousmane Sembène’s Xala.” International Journal of Francophone Studies 6.3 (2003): 183-96.
Education
Ph.D., English, University of Arkansas
M.A., English, University of Michigan
M.S.W., Policy and Planning Concentration, University of Michigan
B.A., English, Clark University