Book Talk: “Atlas’s Bones” 

Join D. Vance Smith (English) for this special event to discuss his new book “Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe” in conversation with Simon Gikandi (English).

The book, published in November 2025 by The University of Chicago Press, traces “Africa’s influence on European culture and how colonization remade Africa in the image of a medieval Europe.”

This event is a collaboration between the Princeton Public Library, the Humanities Council, and the Council’s Program in Humanistic Studies. Co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Program in African Studies, and the Program in Medieval Studies.

A reception will follow. Copies of the book will be available for sale at the event, courtesy of Labyrinth Books.

Vance Smith is a professor in the English Department at Princeton University. His research bridges African and decolonial literature and theory, Africanfuturism, the history of anthropology, and the medieval roots of colonial structures, governance, and thought. His work also centers community engagement, community building, and radical pedagogy in Trenton, New Jersey, where he serves as the Board Chair of Trenton Artworks and as the Board Vice-President of Passage Theater.  In Fall 2025, Smith co-taught the Humanities Sequence “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture” in the Program in Humanistic Studies.

Simon Gikandi is the Class of 1943 University Professor of English and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University, where he is also affiliated with the Departments of Comparative Literature and African American Studies and the Program in African Studies. Gikandi’s major fields of research and teaching are Anglophone literatures and cultures of Africa, India, the Caribbean, and postcolonial Britain; literary and critical theory; the black Atlantic and the African diaspora; and the English novel. His current research projects are on slavery and modernity, Decolonization and African Literature, and Global Modernism.