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2020 - 2022
Inaugural Board of Directors

Our Board of Directors are comprised of those committed to supporting global black cultural studies everywhere.

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Moradewun Adejunmobi

Moradewun Adejunmobi is a Professor in the African American and African Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. She holds courtesy appointments in the French and Comparative Literature departments, and is a former chair of the Performance Studies Graduate Group at UC Davis. Her research interests are in African literature and performance, popular media, and popular culture.

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Carmen McCain

Carmen McCain is an Assistant Professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. Her research focuses on Hausa-language Nigerian literature, film and popular culture. She has been a columnist with the Nigerian newspaper Daily Trust and is co-author, with Brandon Kendhammer, of the book Boko Haram for the Ohio Short Histories of Africa.

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Bola Olaniyan

Bola Olaniyan is passionate about helping people advance their knowledge and careers in whatever form it takes. She has run an internship program in DC for undergraduates and currently is a Site Director for an innovative hybrid college experience that anchors on college, community, and career.

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Kunle Ajibade

Kunle Ajibade is the Executive Editor/ Director of TheNEWS (www.thenewsnigeria.com.ng) and PM NEWS (www.pmnewsnigeria.com), Lagos. In 1995, he was jailed for life because of a story published in TheNEWS and was only released in 1998 when his jailer, the then Head of State, General Sani Abacha, died suddenly in office. Ajibade's prison memoir, Jailed for Life: A Reporter's Prison Notes, was published in2003 and won the first Victor Nwankwo Book of the Year Award instituted by the Nigerian Book Fair Trust. He is also the author of What a Country! published in 2008.

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Adeleke Adeeko

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́'s primary teaching and research interests, about all of which he has published widely and taught consistently at all levels, are Anglophone African literatures, African American literature and Anglophone postcolonial literatures. He maintains fervent teaching and research interests in deconstruction, twentieth-century literary theory and Yorùbá literature and orature. His main research preoccupation at the present time is to read up adequately on animism and language for the purpose of writing a book on the origin of speech acts in poetry. Adéẹ̀kọ́ hopes to be able to correlate features of earnest, written poems about social insurgency with verbal elements of incantations, spell casting, divination, panegyrics and other ordinarily “magical” uses of words.

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Olufemi Taiwo

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò is Professor of African Political Thought and current Chair at the Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, U.S.A.  His research interests include Philosophy of Law, Social and Political Philosophy, Marxism, and African and Africana Philosophy.

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Naminata Diabate

Naminata Diabate is associate professor of comparative literature at Cornell University. A native of Côte d’Ivoire, Diabate received her PhD in Comparative Literature with dual concentrations in African Diaspora Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. With linguistic expertise in Malinké, French, English, Nouchi, Spanish, and Latin, she works on questions of gender, sexuality, and race in African, African-American, Caribbean, and Afro-Hispanic literature, cinema, visual arts, cinema, and new media.

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Akin Adesokan

Akin Adeṣọkan is a Nigerian novelist, essayist and scholar. He is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, and of Cinema and Media Studies at the Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a member of the Association of Nigerian Authors and PEN America, and he serves on the advisory boards of African Center for Cities (University of Cape Town) and a number of academic presses and journals.

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Matthew Brown

Matthew H. Brown is assistant professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focus on African literature, screen media, and theory. His first book, Indirect Subjects: Nollywood’s Local Address, explores the relationship between the Nigerian commercial film industry and Nigerian state television, looking at the way both address themselves to their local publics.

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Wumi Raji

Wumi Raji is a Professor of Drama at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife, Nigeria and holds a doctoral degree of the University of Ibadan. He was a Book Prize winner in the 1988 BBC Arts and Africa Poetry Competition. Wumi Raji has taught at the Universities of Ilorin, Benin, Bayreuth and The Gambia and his essays have appeared in Research in African Literatures, African Literature Today and Matatu: Journal of African Culture, among others.

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Carli Coetzee

Carli Coetzee is the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies and the founder of the Journal Work Academy. Her work as editor is part of a larger activist project that seeks to change publishing patterns that privilege northern-based scholars and institutions. She frequently takes part in research and early career mentoring workshops hosted by African universities and organisations.

Executive Administrative Officer: Moji Olaniyan

Website Editor: Benjamin Heidke

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