Dr Victoria Amma Agyeiwaah Osei-Bonsu
Dr. Victoria Osei-Bonsu, a Senior Lecturer in Literature, is one of Ghana's leading literary critical practitioners whose work lies at the forefront of research into the representation of health and wellbeing in African literature. Informed by a longstanding interest in representation, Dr. Osei-Bonsu’s scholarly trajectory has led her from analysing child characters in contemporary Ghanaian fiction, specifically in the works of Amma Darko, to comparatively examining Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible,” highlighting the complexities of the authenticity of representation.
In her 2018 doctoral project completed at the University of Basel in Switzerland in the area of Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies, Dr. Osei-Bonsu employed a radical postcolonial African perspective to argue that Conrad's portrayal of otherness reveals parallels of degeneration across his European and African subjects. This work highlights how socio-cultural others are constructed through complex dynamics of economic and political power.
Dr. Osei-Bonsu’s focus on representation has currently expanded to the interdisciplinary realm of medical humanities, particularly exploring the critical interfaces between (postcolonial) African literature and health. By critically examining the literary representations of illness, debilitation and defect in comparison to hegemonic notions of health and wellbeing, Dr. Osei-Bonsu’s recent pedagogical initiatives, including a course analysing “Metaphors of Health and Wellbeing” in Shakespeare’s writing, have encouraged students to critically engage with themes of relevance, power, and decolonisation of socio-cultural imaginations and expressions of health/wellbeing, especially in the recent context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Osei-Bonsu’s recent publication on Ama Ata Aidoo’s short story “The Message” further exemplifies this focus, connecting literary analysis with contemporary health discourses. Her research aims to analyse other African literary texts through the same lens.
In 2023-24, Dr. Osei-Bonsu was a lead collaborator on a project investigating ‘Multilingualism and Economic Wellbeing among Female Kayayei (head porters) in Accra,’ funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Before that, Dr. Osei-Bonsu, in 2020-22, received an Andrew Mellon research grant to lead a project on ‘Linguistic Footprints: Language Contacts and Socio-cultural transformations.’ In 2022, Dr. Osei-Bonsu also co-edited a special edition of Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium focusing on research from/on Ghana. She has published widely and has received invitations to talk at the British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Winter Symposium and the South and East Africa Medical Health Humanities (SEAMHH) Symposium.
