Academic Research
Tejumola Olaniyan
International Student Travel Award
The purpose of this Fund at University of Wisconsin-Madison is to support graduate student travel. At least one travel award bearing the name of Tejumola Olaniyan shall be awarded annually to an international graduate student engaged in the study of Global Black Cultures. The African Studies Program shall administer the award competition, with members of the African Studies Program faculty selecting the annual award recipient. The recipient of the award should submit a 1-2 page report detailing the outcomes of their research within 1-year of receiving the award. The award is intended to support domestic or international travel by the student to conduct fieldwork, archival, and/or creative research.
Tejumola Olaniyan Memorial Lecture
In a career that spanned over three decades, Tẹjumọla Ọlaniyan pursued a unique, capacious, and generous vision of humanistic scholarship in the field of African literary and cultural studies, including the black world as a whole and extending beyond it. “My deep interest,” he once asserted with characteristic precision, “is transdisciplinary teaching and research. My goal is the cultivation of critical self-reflexivity about our expressions and their many contexts.”
The Tejumola Olaniyan Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the UW-Madison Department of English with support from the UW-Madison Department of African Cultural Studies and the Center for the Humanities.
Other Research Highlighting Tejumola olaniyan's Work
Towards Global Black Cultural Studies in Theory & Practice: Reading Tejumola Olaniyan
During a thirty-year career, scholar Tejumola Olaniyan wrote seven books and over fifty articles that covered an extraordinary range of topics and genres: from the pop music of Nigerian Fela Kuti and his rebel art and politics to the plays of African American writers Ntozake Shange and Amiri Baraka; from the urban garrison architecture of Lagos and Accra to Caribbean liminal spaces evidenced in Derek Walcott’s writing; from the theories of Negritude to more recent trends of Afrocentrism, Postcolonialism, and Globalism. Olaniyan took both African political cartoons and American popular films like Coming to America seriously—that is, as expressions fully warranting academic analysis and critical self-reflexivity. This paper argues that implicit in Olaniyan’s intellectual legacy is an evolving theory and method of Global Black Cultural Studies. Through a systematic appraisal of his oeuvre, this presentation seeks to identify key principles of Global Black Cultural Studies as Olaniyan forged it, setting the stage for an appraisal of how his scholarship may guide an ever-evolving field of transdisciplinary teaching and research on Black cultures worldwide.
Catherine M. Cole
Professor of Dance and English at the University of Washington
Africa at Noon Speakers Highlighting Tejumola Olaniyan's Work
2022 Speaker
2023 Speaker
Title: “Africa, the Great War, and William Kentridge’s “The Head & the Load”: Theatrical Collage and the Color of Memory”
Speaker: Catherine Cole
Title: "Teaching and Learning in a Time of Waithood"
Speakers: Carli Coetzee