My name is Taylor Eggan, and I’m a scholar and writer based in Portland, Oregon. I currently teach in the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

I completed my PhD in English at Princeton University in 2017. My research interests are broad, and include African literatures (Anglophone, Francophone, Swahilophone), postcolonial and decolonial theory, ecological philosophy, the history of the novel, and theories of world literature. I’m also a novice translator, with a current interest in translating works of African literature from the French and the Swahili. At present I’m working on a translation of the Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop’s debut novel, Le Temps de Tamango (“The Time of Tamango,” 1981).

My published academic writing includes essays on Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Emmanuel Mbogo, and Wole Soyinka. My first book is titled Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination, which examines the uncanny and often disturbing effects that emerge alongside the invocation of “home” and the Heimlich in settler colonial contexts. The book includes chapters on Martin Heidegger, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, C. M. van den Heever, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee.

I created The Exploded View as a venue for long-form essays on world literature in translation. Some of the pieces will feature purely occasional writing. Others will help me work out ideas en route to publication in other places. Regardless of the fate of individual essays, however, my ultimate aim is to contribute sustained and meaningful work to an arena of literature that — in the United States, at least — remains under-recognized, under-appreciated, and under-funded.

I dedicate The Exploded View to the many steadfast translators of the world, as well as to those stalwart and visionary publishers who continue to make translation possible against all the odds.