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Profile
Research Areas
Trauma and memory studies, child soldier testimony, life writing, digital media cultures,
Profile
Nick Mdika Tembo is Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Malawi. His scholarship examines how trauma is narrated, mediated, and remembered in contemporary African contexts, with particular attention to life writing, child soldier testimony, and the ethical implications of digital media cultures. He is the editor of Trauma in the Age of Social Media in Sub-Saharan Africa: Narrative and Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) and the author of a working paper In the Aftermath of a National Tragedy: Excavating Memories of Cyclone Freddy in Malawi (Nordic Africa Institute, 2025), which analyses the formation of collective memory after environmental catastrophe. Tembo has held research and visiting fellowships at the University of the Free State, Rhodes University, and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research/ Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden.
Publications
- Journal Article
Ndine Puludzu: Haswell Kunyenje’s Political Cartoons and the Malawian Public (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1080/17533171.2025.2577512
- Journal Article
‘A God of Justice?’ Evil and the Framing of Suffering in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1080/21674736.2025.2548703
- Journal Article
Guilty on the Innocent Side: Evil Subjectivity in Two Eastern African Child Soldier Memoirs (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1080/02533952.2025.2469997
- Journal Article
Bury My Bones, But Keep My Words: Chinua Achebe Remembered (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1108/JHASS-07-2025-0123
- Book
Trauma in the Age of Social Media in Sub Saharan Africa: Narrative and Representation (2025)
- Book Chapters
Introduction: The Contours of Social Media Trauma (2025)
- Book Chapters
Consequences of My Actions: Versions of Perpetrator Trauma in Nigerian YouTube Videos (2025)
- Book Chapters
The Attention Economy of Micro-influencers in Malawi: The Case of Stanford Sinyangwe (2025)
- Refereed Monograph
In the Aftermath of a National Tragedy: Excavating Memories of Cyclone Freddy in Malawi (2025)
- Journal Article
Girls at War, Girls in War: Three Female African Child Soldier Narratives (2024)
https://doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2024.0580
- Journal Article
Women, Political Violence and the Production of Fear in Malawian Social Media Texts (2024)
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2023.2298217
- Book Chapters
Framing Eastern African Precarious Mobilities: Two Women’s War Narratives (2024)
- Book Chapters
Memoricide, Negationism and Representation: Centring Rwanda’s ‘Double Genocide’ Discourse in the Present Tense (2024)
- Book Chapters
COVID-19 and Anxiety Constructions in African Poetry (2024)
- Journal Article
Politics of Memorialisation in a Rwandan Witness Memoir: Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter (2022)
https://doi.org/10.1080/10131752.2022.2157999
- Journal Article
Confronting Apartheid’s Revenants: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and/as Traumedy (2022)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2135241
- Journal Article
Space, Time and Graphic Wit(h)nessing: Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile through the Tears (2022)
https://doi.org/10.1080/23277408.2022.2096978
- Journal Article
Anxious Competition: Exploring the Poetic Imaginarium of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic in Malawi (2022)
https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/10418
- Journal Article
National Identity and Xenophobia in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2021)
https://doi.org/10.25159/2663-6565/7559
- Journal Article
Challenging Androcentric Conceptions of Nationalism: Reimagining Female Agency in Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2020)
https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2020.1780300
- Journal Article
Perceiving Precarity and Extremism in Nuruddin Farah’s North of Dawn (2020)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9572-9763
