Director

Dr Senayon Olaoluwa obtained his Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English from the then Ogun State University (now Olabisi Onabanjo University), Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria, in 1997 in the Second Class Upper Division and doubled as the best departmental graduating student. He obtained his Master of Arts in English with Literature specialization from the University of Ibadan, Ibadan, in 2003. Between 2006 and 2009, he trained for his Ph.D. in African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Dr Olaoluwa is the recipient of numerous grants and academic awards, and is widely published. His research grants and fellowships include the African Humanities Program Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS, 2011-12); All Africa House Fellowship, University of Cape Town, South Africa (2016); African Guest Researchers’ Programme, Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden (2016). He was awarded a grant by the Nordic Africa Institute to organize a two-day international symposium on ‘Enfranchising the African Diaspora: Comparing Notes across Sub-Saharan Africa’ (2017), and got a DAAD grant for a research stay at the University of Mainz, Germany (2017).

Dr Olaoluwa was the pioneer Coordinator of our programme in Diaspora and Transnational Studies, and has been Sub-Dean of our Institute, Editor of our flagship journal African Notes, and Head of the IAS Scientific Committee. His publications have appeared in African Affairs, Journal of African Cultural Studies, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Social Dynamics, among other such outlets. His latest output, ‘Dislocating Anthropocene: The City and Oil in Helon Habila’s Oil on Water’, published in Isle Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, (Spring 2020, Vol. 27, No. 2), was recently ranked in the top 10 publications on social and environmental justice by the Oxford University Press.