Biography
Dr. Thomas Jay Lynn serves as associate professor of English and program chair of the associate degree in Multidisciplinary Studies, whose students he advises along with College of Liberal Arts students. He also is a faculty member of the Global Studies baccalaureate degree. His teaching and scholarly interests include African, world, and ancient literatures, as well as the music of The Beatles. Lynn’s book, Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration: Envisioning Language (2017), was published by Palgrave Macmillan, and his other writings on African literature have been published in many refereed journals and numerous books.
Lynn 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. He was awarded the 2021 Penn State University Comparative Literature Sydney Aboul-Hosn Award for making “a decisive contribution to [students'] study of literature in a global context.” In 2024, chapters by Lynn appeared in two different books published by Routledge: “Women’s Abandonment and Illness in African Literature,” in Disease and Discrimination: Gender Discrimination during the Pandemic in South Asia and Beyond; and “The Silences of War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun,” in (Re)Writing War in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Beyond Post-Memory.
Publications
The following selection includes recent publications.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “The Silences of War in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.”
(Re)Writing War in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Beyond Post-Memory. Ed. Maria Cristina Pividori Gurgo and David Owen. New York: Routledge, 2025. 72-82.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “Spiral of Destruction: War, Silence, and Environment in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Ike’s Sunset at Dawn.” Ecological Interconnections: Critical Readings on Ethics, Sustainability, and Interspecies Communication in Literature and Culture. Ed. Shruti Das and Mridul Bordoloi. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2025. 35-47.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “Women’s Abandonment and Illness in African Literature.” Disease and Discrimination: Gender Discrimination during the Pandemic in South Asia and Beyond. Ed. Sourav Kumar Nag. New York: Routledge, 2024. 151-69.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “Self-possession and the Crisis of Post-colony in Achebe’s A Man of the People.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (Sage): 58.2 (June 2023): 442-462.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “The Trauma of Loss and the Loss of Self in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.”
Literary Oracle 6.1 (2022): 169-77.
Lynn, Thomas Jay. Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration: Envisioning Language, Palgrave Macmillan (2017).
Lynn, Thomas Jay. “‘Redemption Song’: Slavery’s Disruption in Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of
Ghosts.” English Studies in Africa (Routledge) 59.2 (2016): 54-63.
Podcast
Front Porch Book Club Podcast, Episode 88: Dr. Thomas Jay Lynn. October 15, 2024.
Hosts and sisters Linda Culberton and Nancy Shank discuss Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart with Associate Profess of English Dr. Thomas Jay Lynn. Dr. Lynn speaks about his own book about Achebe, titled Chinua Achebe and the Politics of Narration: Envisioning Language.
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