Victoria Amma Agyeiwaah Osei-Bonsu (PhD)
Adjunct: Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies
Dr. Victoria OSEI-BONSU is a Senior Lecturer in English, and currently holds a Yosef Wosk Visiting Scholar award at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, Wolfson College, University of Oxford. She has taught in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) for almost two decades. Many of her former students from the University of Ghana, Legon, and other institutions have gone on to successfully pursue higher degrees and become well-accomplished professionals and leaders in their fields of expertise. Funded by a Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, and with completion grants from the Fondation Oumou Dilly and the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft, Dr. Osei-Bonsu obtained her PhD (cum laude) in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her research, some of which has been supported by prestigious funders like the Andrew Mellon foundation, broadly encompasses discourses of identity and wellbeing within and across postcolonial (con)texts. In some of her work she has examined the wellbeing of female characters in literary texts from a rhetorical perspective; while in other collaborative research she has explored how ‘othered’ female ‘head porters’ (Kayayie) in Accra deploy language as a negotiating tool for better economic outcomes that impact their overall wellbeing. With her budding interest in the medical humanities, she continues to focus on literary representations of marginal (mostly female) identities and their intersections with discourses of health and wellbeing. One of her recent articles highlighting the ambiguity of health communication within the context of the COVID-19 outbreak in Ghana is published under the title “Thirdsight and the Disambiguation of Health Communication: A Dialectics of Ghana’s COVID-19 Situation and Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘The Message’.” As an invited speaker, a panellist or a participant, she has given talks and presentations at many national and international workshops and conferences.
- Written and Oral Communication
- Text and Meaning
- Rhetoric and Discourses of Marginalisation
- Medical Humanities in Literature
- Narrating and negotiating health in Postcolonial con(texts)
- Theorising Cultural identities in globalised spaces
- Storying and analysing health and wellbeing
- Orfson-Offei, E. Ansah, G. N., and Osei-Bonsu, V. (2025). “Multilingualism and Economic Wellbeing of Female Migrants in Accra” in Multilingualism and Wellbeing. Routledge 2025.
- Osei-Poku, K., and Osei-Bonsu, V. (2023). “Silence as Language in Nourbese Philip’s Looking for Dr. Livingstone: An Odyssey into Silence.” in Southern Resonances: Southern Epistemologies, Southern Praxes and the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Greater Caribbean and Beyond. Eds. N. Faraclas, R. Severing, et al, 23(2), 123-133. http://islandsinbetween.com/2023-volume-2/
- Osei-Bonsu, V. (2022). “Signifyin(g): Racialising the Other in Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus.” Legon Journal of the Humanit. 33.1; 63-87. https://www.ajol.info/index.php/ljh/article/view/232437
- Osei-Bonsu, V., Ana Sobral, & Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang (2022). “Introduction: Ghana in Transition.” Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium 7.1 (2022): 1-6. https://kairostext.in/index.php/kairostext/article/view/134
- Osei-Bonsu, V. (2022). “Thirdsight and the Disambiguation of Health Communication: A Dialectics of Ghana’s COVID-19 Situation and Ama Ata Aidoo’s ‘The Message’.” Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium 7.1; 41-55. https://kairostext.in/index.php/kairostext/article/view/137
- PhD (cum laude) in Anglophone Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland
- MPhil in English, University of Ghana, Legon
- B.A. in English with Linguistics, University of Ghana, Legon.

