Pirjo Ahokas is Professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Turku, Finland. She started her academic career by
focussing on Jewish American fiction, and is the author of
Forging a New Self , a monograph on Bernard Malamud's
novels, and co-editor (with Martine Chard-Hutchinson) of
Reclaiming Memory: American Representations of the
Holocaust . Pirjo Ahokas's subsequent research deals with
works by women authors of Chinese, African American and Native
American descent. More recently, she has concentrated on new
writing by Black British women authors an compared their works with
those by contemporary American ethnic women authors. All the
authors on whose work she has published are either first- or
second-generation immigrants.