“I’m Muslim Don’t Panic”: Responding to French Islamophobia through Hip-Hop Sponsored by:

Co sponsored by the Office of Diversity Affairs, Dept. of French & Italian, and the L. P. Irvin Lecture Fund.

Mich Yonah Nyawalo is an Associate Professor of World Literature at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio, where he also serves as the director of the honors program. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master of Arts degrees in English (with specializations in literature, sociolinguistics and cultural studies) at West University and Gothenburg University (respectively), both in Sweden. He completed his second Master’s as well as a Ph.D. in comparative literature with a focus on media and globalization studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is fluent in French, English, Swahili and Luo and speaks Swedish at a high-intermediate level. His areas of specialization are globalization studies, postcolonial criticism, African literatures (including audio and visual cultures from the continent), media studies, critical pedagogy and service learning. The years he has spent living and studying in Kenya, Uganda, France, Sweden and the United States have highly defined his academic projects, which appropriate a mixture of critical tools and scholarly texts derived from the fields of African, African Diaspora and African-American Studies. As a comparatist, his research is fully grounded in the intersections of literary criticism, economic history, mass communications and cultural studies. In his spare time, Mich enjoys traveling, reading, drinking wine and enjoying lively discussions with friends.