Ruth Bush is Associate Professor in African and French Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching concerns African and Diasporic literary and cultural production, with a particular interests in material print cultures (i.e. histories of publishing and reading), literary translation, gender, and decolonial practice. She has published a history of New Beacon Books, the UK’s first radical black bookshop and publishing house; and co-produced an exhibition and digital resource about the pioneering Senegalese women’s magazine, Awa: la revue de la femme noire. Her first academic monograph was Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–67 (LUP, 2016), which received the First Book Award (Scholarship) from the African Literature Association. Her second academic monograph, Translation Imperatives (CUP) is forthcoming.  She is currently working on a 5-year ERC-funded project, 'The Creative Lives of African universities', with colleagues in Senegal, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire and Benin.

Her research has appeared in journals including Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Francosphères, Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Cahiers d’Etudes africaines. She is a founding member of the steering committee for the Centre for Black Humanities and she sits on the board of Afrika Eye Festival, the largest African film festival in the South West. 

Ruth teaches a range of topics in African literature, translation, and cultural studies at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She welcomes enquiries from prospective students. She convenes the following units: Introduction to Francophone African Literature, Journeys Through Poetry, African Narratives of Migration, Pan-Africanism: ideas and archives, Theorizing Violence. She also contributes to postgraduate units on Global Cultures of the Book, Migration and Mobility, Cultural Imagination of Gender, Black Humanities, and Research Skills. In 2016/17 she was Programme Director on the Foundation in Arts and Humanities, a 1-year course designed for students without conventional academic qualifications and which provides access to undergraduate degrees. From 2019-2021 she was Programme Director for the MA Black Humanities. She will be on maternity leave in 2021-22.