Professor Lewis has been teaching African Literature at the College of Charleston since 1996. He edits the literary journal "Illuminations: An International Magazine of Contemporary Writing," and is closely associated with the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World (CLAW) program.
He has published two monographs, "White Women Writers and Their African Invention" (2003), and "British and African Literature in Transnational Context" (2011) with the University Press of Florida, and has published widely on South African writers, including novelists Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer, and poets Ingrid de Kok and Dennis Brutus.