Alvan Ikoku works at the intersection of literature and medicine, specializing in the study of African and African diasporic literatures, twentieth-century fiction, narrative ethics, and histories of tropical medicine and global health.
He is primarily concerned with literary, medical, and public health discourses on Africa and its diasporas. His research situates these discourses within post-nineteenth-century movements in world literature and world health. And currently, as part of a book project, he studies the place of the long narrative forms, particularly the novel, in the emergence of global health as a modern medical specialty.
Prof. Ikoku has written for the World Health Organization, Small Axe, Literature and Medicine, Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics, and Virtual Mentor, the ethics journal of the American Medical Association. He has also received president’s teaching awards at Columbia and Harvard Universities.
