Research Areas

Trauma and memory studies, genocide studies, childhood studies, child soldier narratives, African life writing, digital media,

Profile

Nick Mdika Tembo is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Malawi. His research focuses on trauma and memory studies, with particular emphasis on African life writing, genocide studies, childhood studies, child soldier narratives, and digital media. Tembo is the editor of Trauma in the Age of Social Media in Sub Saharan Africa: Narrative and Representation (2025) and co-editor of Beyond the Call of Duty and Other Stories from Africa (2011). His scholarly contributions have been widely recognised; in 2025 he received the Hogan Prize for best essay in the a/b: Auto/Biography Studies special issue Comic Lives.

Publications

• Journal Article
  A God of Justice?’ Evil and the Framing of Suffering in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2025)
  

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• Journal Article
  Choiceless Choices: Constructing the Female Child’s Body in Tola Rotimi Abraham’s Black Sunday (2025)
  

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• Journal Article
  Guilty on the Innocent Side: Evil Subjectivity in Two Eastern African Child Soldier Memoirs (2025)
  

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• Book
  Trauma in the Age of Social Media in Sub Saharan Africa: Narrative and Representation (2025)
  

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• Book Chapters
  Consequences of My Actions: Versions of Perpetrator Trauma in Nigerian YouTube Videos (2025)
  

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• Book Chapters
  Introduction: The Contours of Social Media Trauma (2025)
  

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• Book Chapters
  The Attention Economy of Micro-influencers in Malawi: The Case of Stanford Sinyangwe (2025)
  

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• Journal Article
  Girls at War, Girls in War: Three Female African Child Soldier Narratives (2024)
  

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• Journal Article
  Women, Political Violence and the Production of Fear in Malawian Social Media Texts (2024)
  

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• Book Chapters
  Framing Eastern African Precarious Mobilities: Two Women’s War Narratives. (2024)
  

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• Book Chapters
  Memoricide, Negationism and Representation: Centring Rwanda’s ‘Double Genocide’ Discourse in the Present Tense (2024)
  

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• Book Chapters
  COVID-19 and Anxiety Constructions in African Poetry (2024)
  

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• Journal Article
  Politics of Memorialisation in a Rwandan Witness Memoir: Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter (2022)
  

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• Journal Article
  Confronting Apartheid’s Revenants: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and/as Traumedy (2022)
  

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• Journal Article
  Space, Time and Graphic Wit(h)nessing: Rupert Bazambanza’s Smile through the Tears (2022)
  

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• Journal Article
  Anxious Competition: Exploring the Poetic Imaginarium of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic in Malawi (2022)
  

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• Journal Article
  National Identity and Xenophobia in Kopano Matlwa’s Period Pain (2021)
  

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• Journal Article
  Challenging Androcentric Conceptions of Nationalism: Reimagining Female Agency in Maaza Mengiste’s Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (2020)
  

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• Journal Article
  Perceiving Precarity and Extremism in Nuruddin Farah’s North of Dawn (2020)
  

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• Journal Article
  Troubling Frames: Zapiro’s Iconography on Oscar Pistorius as Traumics (2019)
  

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• Journal Article
  Reading Emmanuel Jal’s War Child as Spiritual Autobiography (2019)
  

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• Journal Article
  ‘Made of Sterner Stuff’: Female Agency and Resilience in Nadifa Mohamed’s The Orchard of Lost Souls (2019)
  

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• Journal Article
  Reframing Migrant Identities: Namelessness and Impersonation in Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names (2019)
  

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• Journal Article
  Rape, War and the Abject in Halima Bashir’s Tears of the Desert: A Memoir of Survival in Darfur (2018)
  

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• Journal Article
  Katabasis, Adult Betrayals and Liminal Identities in China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life (2017)
  

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• Journal Article
  Reading the Trauma of Internally Displaced Identities in Goretti Kyomuhendo’s Waiting (2017)
  

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• Journal Article
  Reduced to Rubbish: Trauma and Migrant Identities in Cristina Ali Farah’s Little Mother (2017)
  

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• Journal Article
  Unhomeliness, Unending Phobias and Liminality in Senait Mehari’s Heart of Fire (2017)
  

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• Journal Article
  Writing Parrhesia, Narrating the Other Rwandan Genocide: Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter and Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga’s Dying to Live (2016)
  

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• Journal Article
  Paranoia, ‘Chosen Trauma’ and Forgiveness in Leah Chishugi’s A Long Way from Paradise (2015)
  

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• Journal Article
  Representations of ‘Economic Hit Men’ in Selected Malawian Poetry (2015)
  

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