Dr Olorunyomi, a Research Professor in our Cultural and Media Studies programme, obtained his PhD in African Literature from the University of Ibadan. His specialization and research interests include textual and narrative structures of literary and performance cultures, covering oral and manuscript, print and electronic, film and new media in Africa and the Black Diaspora.
Quondam Director of the University Media Centre as well former Postgraduate Sub-Dean, IAS-UI, well-published in local and international outlets, Prof Olorunyomi has participated over the decades in conferences and seminars across Africa and the Black Diaspora, including Nigeria, Ghana, Benin Republic, Burkina Faso, Senegal, South Africa, and Brazil, to mention a few. He has also participated in seminars under the auspices of Free Muse, Copenhagen-Denmark, Salzburg Global Seminar, Salzburg-Austria, and WIU Macomb-Illinois, USA, among others.
As his research engagements in the last thirty years have spanned West Africa, the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and North America, where he taught ‘Black Aesthetic Continuities and Ruptures’ at Northwestern University, Evanston, he has also developed recent research thrusts relating to the possibilities of intersecting digital technologies with the earliest phases of memorialization as a critical enterprise in futurity and self-narrativity, conceptualized in his coinage ‘wombiture’.
In the midst of all of this, Prof Olorunyomi also finds time to pursue sunlight, laughter, and escape from institutions of containment, as he plays with The Afrolinks Jazz and Highlife Band where he experiments with his old bass guitar.
We are assured of an exciting time at IAS-UI during his directorship.
‘Afrobeat! Fela and the Imagined Continent’, by Sola Olorunyomi